Fast memory state synchronization for virtualization-based fault tolerance

Virtualization provides the possibility of whole machine migration and thus enables a new form of fault tolerance that is completely transparent to applications and operating systems. While initial prototypes show promise, virtualization-based fault-tolerant architecture still experiences substantia...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Maohua Lu, Tzi-cker Chiueh
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Application virtualization
Costs
Delay
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
Master-slave
Operating systems
Prototypes
Virtual machining
Web server
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Virtualization provides the possibility of whole machine migration and thus enables a new form of fault tolerance that is completely transparent to applications and operating systems. While initial prototypes show promise, virtualization-based fault-tolerant architecture still experiences substantial performance overhead especially for data-intensive workloads. The main performance challenge of virtualization-based fault tolerance is how to synchronize the memory states of the Master and Slave in a way that minimizes the end-to-end impact on the application performance. This paper describes three optimization techniques for memory state synchronization: fine-grained dirty region identification, speculative state transfer, and synchronization traffic reduction using active slave, and presents a comprehensive performance study of these techniques under three realistic workloads, the TPC-E benchmark, the SPECsfs 2008 CIFS benchmark, and a Microsoft Exchange workload. We show that these three techniques can each reduce the amount of end-of-epoch synchronization traffic by a factor of up to 7, 15 and 5, respectively.
ISSN:1530-0889
2158-3927
DOI:10.1109/DSN.2009.5270295