Updating hypervisors in cloud data centers – WalkIn

Updating and maintaining hypervisors are tricky operations, but very common in data centers. Virtual machine (VM) migration is the main tool in the update process. VMs on servers are migrated to third-party servers, the hypervisor update is performed, and the VMs are retransferred. Although it is functional, this approach has many limitations: time-consuming because of migration, saturates network resources in the data center, and often requires a shutdown of client VMs. This project presents WalkIn, which is a platform for performing updates on main open-source hypervisors without the need for migration. WalkIn saves the running states of the VMs in memory, performs the update on the hypervisor, and restores VMs on the server all with a low VM interruption.