Checkpoint-based fault-tolerant infrastructure for virtualized service providers

Crash and omission failures are common in service providers: a disk can break down or a link can fail anytime. In addition, the probability of a node failure increases with the number of nodes. Apart from reducing the provider's computation power and jeopardizing the fulfillment of his contracts, this can also lead to computation time wasting when the crash occurs before finishing the task execution. In order to avoid this problem, efficient checkpoint infrastructures are required, especially in virtualized environments where these infrastructures must deal with huge virtual machine images. This paper proposes a smart checkpoint infrastructure for virtualized service providers. It uses Another Union File System to differentiate read-only from read-write parts in the virtual machine image. In this way, read-only parts can be checkpointed only once, while the rest of checkpoints must only save the modifications in read-write parts, thus reducing the time needed to make a checkpoint....

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NOMS
• Authors: Iñigo Goiri, Ferran Julià, Jordi Guitart, Jordi Torres
• Keywords: Communications, Node Failure, NOMS 2010, Task Execution, Virtual Machine Image