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ASPLOS
2004
ACM

Devirtualizable virtual machines enabling general, single-node, online maintenance

14 years 4 months ago
Devirtualizable virtual machines enabling general, single-node, online maintenance
Maintenance is the dominant source of downtime at high availability sites. Unfortunately, the dominant mechanism for reducing this downtime, cluster rolling upgrade, has two shortcomings that have prevented its broad acceptance. First, cluster-style maintenance over many nodes is typically performed a few nodes at a time, making maintenance slow and often impractical. Second, cluster-style maintenance does not work on single-node systems, despite the fact that their unavailability during maintenance can be painful for organizations. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for online maintenance that uses virtual machines to provide maintenance on single nodes, allowing parallel maintenance over multiple nodes, and online maintenance for standalone servers. We present the Microvisor, our prototype virtual machine system that is custom tailored to the needs of online maintenance. Unlike general purpose virtual machine environments that induce continual 10-20% overhead, the Microviso...
David E. Lowell, Yasushi Saito, Eileen J. Samberg
Added 30 Jun 2010
Updated 30 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where ASPLOS
Authors David E. Lowell, Yasushi Saito, Eileen J. Samberg
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