Vigilant: out-of-band detection of failures in virtual machines

What do our computer systems do all day? How do we make sure they continue doing it when failures occur? Traditional approaches to answering these questions often involve inband monitoring agents. However in-band agents suffer from several drawbacks: they need to be written or customized for every workload (operating system and possibly also application), they comprise potential security liabilities, and are themselves affected by adverse conditions in the monitored systems. Virtualization technology makes it possible to encapsulate an entire operating system or application instance within a virtual object that can then be easily monitored and manipulated without any knowledge of the contents or behavior of that object. This can be done out-of-band, using general purpose agents that do not reside inside the object, and hence are not affected by the behavior of the object. This paper describes Vigilant, a novel way of monitoring virtual machines for problems. Vigilant requires no speci...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGOPS
• Authors: Dan Pelleg, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Richard Harper, Lisa Spainhower, Tokunbo O. S. Adeshiyan
• Keywords: In-band Agents, Potential Security Liabilities, SIGOPS 2008, Virtual Object