Service Migration Using Virtualization

With the current distributed world and increasing number of clustered environment, it has become more and more important to be able to move running services from one machine to another. Virtualization provides a feasible mechanism to break the connection between the running process and the hardware. Placing the process in virtual environment makes it possible to give a virtual view to the process of its environment. This view can them be mapped to different actual resources (memory, names, identifiers) in different machines.

Virtualization can be done either on process level or on the system level. When virtualizing the environment for the process. The virtual container only has the process (or process group). This container can be migrated to a machine with similar hardware and operating system. If the operating system must also be allowed to change, then the virtualization is done on the system level and the virtual machine contains both the running processes and the operating system serving them. In this case the whole virtual machine needs to be migrated.