Since first demonstrated by Clark et al in 2005, live migration of virtual machines has both become a standard feature of hypervisors and created an active field of research. However, the rich ongoing research in live migration focus mainly on performance improvements to well-known techniques, most of them being variations of the Clark approach. In order to advance live migration beyond incremental performance improvements, it is important to gain a deeper understanding of the live migration problem itself and its underlying principles.

To address this issue, this contribution takes a step back and investigates the essential characteristics of live migration. The paper identifies 5 fundamental properties of live migration and uses these to investigate, categorize, and compare three approaches to live migration, precopy, postcopy and hybrid. The evaluated algorithms include well-known techniques derived from that of Clark as well as novel RDMA in-kernel approaches. Our analysis of the fundamental properties of the algorithms is validated by a set of experiments. In these, we migrate virtual machines with large memory sizes hosting workloads with high page dirtying rates to expose differences and limitations of the different approaches. Finally, we provide guidelines for which approach to use in different scenarios.