Using Non-Deterministic Event Log and Replay to Support Virtual Machine Fault Tolerance of Kernel-based Virtual Machine

• Main Authors: Jin-Wei Shang, 商晉瑋
• Other Authors: Wei-Jen Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12159849126375856102

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 104 === Virtual machine fault tolerance (VMFT) is a technology enabling continuous execution upon hardware/software failures, and it thus can be used to protect virtualized, critical software services. There are two ways to implement VMFT. The first one uses a continuous-checkpointing strategy, in which a backup virtual machine (VM) keeps receiving the latest VM checkpoint from the protected VM. The other one uses a log-and-replay strategy, in which all events in the protected VM are recorded and the recorded events are turned into deterministic events for replay in the backup VM. Once the protected VM fails, the backup VM replaces the role of the protected VM immediately to minimize service downtime. This research aims to provide a log-and-replay-based mechanism for VMFT over Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Before entering the phase of VMFT, the proposed mechanism creates the backup VM by live cloning the protected VM. Then, the two VMs enter the fault tolerance phase, in which they synchronize periodically. In each synchronization epoch, the proposed mechanism monitors the non-deterministic events happening on the protected VM, and identifies the logical time along with the parameters of the events. It then transfers the logged data to the backup VM for event replay. Upon reception of the data, the backup VM sets instruction break points at the right place and starts execution. It injects each logged event when reaches the corresponding break point. The backup VM signals the protected VM when it finishes. When the protected VM fails during the fault tolerance phase, the backup VM is responsible to detect such a failure and to replace the role of the protected VM.