Mitigating Virtualization Failures Through Migration to a Co-Located Hypervisor

• Main Author: Cerveira, Frederico
• Publication Date: 2021
• Other Authors: Barbosa, Raul, Madeira, Henrique
• Format: Article
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/100878; https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3098644
• topic: Cloud computing; dependability; fault injection; fault tolerance; virtualization

Many organizations are moving their systems to the cloud, where providers consolidate multiple clients using virtualization, which creates challenges to business-critical applications. Research has shown that hypervisors fail, often causing common-mode failures that may abruptly disrupt dozens of virtual machines simultaneously. We hypothesize and empirically show that a significant percentage of virtual machines affected by a hypervisor failure are capable of continuing execution on a new hypervisor. Supported by this observation, we design a technique for recovering from hypervisor failures through efficient virtual machine migration to a co-located hypervisor, which allows virtual machines to continue executing with minimal downtime and which can be transparently applied to existing applications. We evaluate a proofof-concept implementation using fault injection of hardware and software faults and show that it can recover, on average, 41-46% of all virtual machines, as well as having a mean virtual machine downtime of 3 seconds