Migrating Linux Containers Using Criu

Process migration is one of the most important techniques in modern computing centers. It enables the implementation of load balancing strategies and eases the system administration. As supercomputers continue to grow in size, according mechanisms become interesting to High-Performance Computing (HPC) as well.Usually, migration is accomplished by means of hypervisor-based virtualization. However, container-based approaches are an attractive alternative for HPC to minimize the performance penalties. In contrast to virtual machine migration, the migration of operating system containers is mostly unexplored in the context of HPC until today.In this paper we present a prototype implementation of a libvirt driver enabling the migration of LinuX Containers. We evaluate the driver in terms of overhead added by the additional software layer and compare its migration performance with that of virtual machines based on KVM.