SmartNIC-Enabled Live Migration for Storage-Optimized VMs

Cloud providers offer storage-optimized VMs equipped with locally attached storage to meet the high performance requirements of cloud users. However, current cloud providers cannot enable live migration for storage-optimized VMs due to the high resource overheads. Moreover, resources should be permanently provisioned for live migration as on-demand provisioning needs to de-allocate resources from either VMs or the hypervisor, thus violating SLA. We propose a storage live migration acceleration system on SmartNICs. Our design achieves minimal resource overhead and SLA violations by proposing (1) a SmartNIC-managed live migration architecture and (2) an efficient consistency algorithm. We implement a basic prototype on an FPGA-based SmartNIC. Preliminary results show that we can migrate storage-optimized VMs with no host resource usage and minimal performance interference to RocksDB running inside the VM. This project is part of the Terminus Project [28].