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, virtualizationbased fault-tolerant architecture still experiences substantial performance overhead especially for data-intensive workloads. The main performance challenge of virtualizationbased 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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DSN
• Authors: Maohua Lu, Tzi-cker Chiueh
• Keywords: Computer Networks, DSN 2009, Fault Tolerance, Memory State, Synchronization Traffic