Context: Cloud computing is one of the most widely used technologies all over the world that provides numerous products and IT services. Virtualization is one of the innovative technologies in cloud computing which has advantages of improved resource utilisation and management. Live migration is an innovative feature of virtualization that allows a virtual machine or container to be transferred from one physical server to another.  Live migration is a complex process which can have a significant impact on cloud computing when used by the cloud-based software.

 Objectives: In this study, live migration of LXC and OpenVZ containers has been performed.  Later the performance of LXC and OpenVZ has been conducted in terms of total migration time and downtime. Further CPU utilisation, disk utilisation and an average load of the servers is also evaluated during the process of live migration. The main aim of this research is to compare the performance of LXC and OpenVZ during live migration of containers.

 Methods: A literature study has been done to gain knowledge about the process of live migration and the metrics that are required to compare the performance of LXC and OpenVZ during live migration of containers. Further an experiment has been conducted to compute and evaluate the performance metrics that have been identified in the literature study. The experiment was done to investigate and evaluate migration process for both LXC and OpenVZ. Experiments were designed and conducted based on the objectives which were to be met.

Results:  The results of the experiments include the migration performance of both LXC and OpenVZ. The performance metrics identified in the literature review, total migration time and downtime, were evaluated for LXC and OpenVZ. Further graphs were plotted for the CPU utilisation, disk utilisation, and average load during the live migration of containers. The results were analysed to compare the performance differences between OpenVZ and LXC during live migration of containers.

Conclusions.  The conclusions that can be drawn from the experiment. LXC has shown higher utilisation, thus lower performance when compared with OpenVZ. However, LXC has less migration time and downtime when compared to OpenVZ.