Live Logical Partition Migration with Stateful Offload Connections Using Context Extraction and Insertion

• US 20130086200A1
• Filed: 08/13/2012
• Published: 04/04/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 10/04/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Cardona, Omar, Alanis, Francisco Jesus
• Granted Patent: US 9,588,807 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/214
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/4557 Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4856 resumption being on a different machine, e.g. task migration, virtual machine migration G06F9/5088 takes precedence

Abstract

An approach is provided in which a migration agent receives a message to migrate a virtual machine from a first system to a second system. The first system extracts hardware state data stored in a native format from a memory area located on first system'"'"'s network adapter. The hardware state data is utilized by the first system'"'"'s network adapter to process data packets generated by the virtual machine. Next, the virtual machine is migrated to the second system, which includes copying the extracted hardware state data from the first system to the second system. In turn, the second system configures a corresponding second network adapter by writing the copied hardware state data to a memory located on the second network adapter.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving a message to migrate a virtual machine executing on a first system to a second system, wherein the first system includes a first network adapter used to send data packets over a computer network;

extracting hardware state data stored in a native format in a first memory area of the first network adapter, wherein the hardware state data is used to process the data packets generated by the virtual machine;

migrating the virtual machine to the second system, wherein the migrating includes copying the extracted hardware state data from the first memory to the second system; and

configuring a second network adapter included on the second system, wherein the configuration includes writing the hardware state data to a second memory included on the second network adapter.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

wherein the extracting includes storing the hardware state data in a first shared memory area in the first system at a memory block starting address; and

wherein the configuring includes retrieving the hardware state data from a second shared memory area in the second system at the memory block starting address.

3. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

utilizing the hardware state data in the native format to perform the configuring of the second network adapter.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

establishing a connection between a first hypervisor included in the first system and a second hypervisor included in the second system;

allocating, by the second hypervisor, memory space on the second system on which to migrate the virtual machine; and

streaming the virtual machine from the first hypervisor to the second hypervisor, the second hypervisor storing the virtual machine in the allocated memory space.

5. The method of claim 4 further comprising:

sending, by the second hypervisor, a state insert command to the second network adapter, the state insert command instructing the second network adapter to retrieve the hardware state data from a memory block starting address included in the allocated memory space.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

quiescing, by the first system prior to the migration, I/O and memory transactions corresponding to the virtual machine; and

resuming execution of the virtual machine, by the second system after the migration, at a state immediately prior to the quiescing at the first system.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the first network adapter processes the data packets according to a stateful offload format that is selected from the group consisting of a Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) format, an Internet Wide RDMA Protocol (iWARP) format, an Infiniband (IB) format, and a TCP Offload Engine (TOE) format.

8. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

wherein the data packets are sent by the first network adapter through an overlay network environment, the overlay network environment including one or more virtual networks that are independent of physical topology constraints of a physical network; and

wherein the overlay network environment includes a distributed policy service, the distributed policy service determining that the first network adapter and the second network adapter are equivalent.

9. A method comprising:

receiving a message to migrate a virtual machine executing on a first system to a second system, wherein the first system includes a first network adapter used to send data packets over a computer network;

extracting hardware state data stored in a native format in a first memory area of the first network adapter, wherein the hardware state data is used to process the data packets generated by the virtual machine;

storing the extracted hardware state data in a first shared memory area in the first system at a memory block starting address;

establishing a connection between a first hypervisor included in the first system and a second hypervisor included in the second system;

migrating the virtual machine to the second system using the established connection, wherein the migrating includes copying the hardware state data from the first shared memory area to a second shared memory area located on the second system;

retrieving the hardware state data from the second shared memory area at the memory block starting address; and

configuring a second network adapter included on the second system, wherein the configuration includes writing the retrieved hardware state data to a second memory included on the second network adapter.