A Fast Rejuvenation Technique for Server Consolidation with Virtual Machines

  • Authors:

  • Kenichi Kourai;Shigeru Chiba

  • Affiliations:

  • Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan;Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

  • Venue:
  • DSN '07 Proceedings of the 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

As server consolidation using virtual machines (VMs) is carried out, software aging of virtual machine monitors (VMMs) is becoming critical. Performance degradation or crash failure of a VMM affects all VMs on it. To counteract such software aging, a proactive technique called software rejuvenation has been proposed. A typical example of rejuvenation is to reboot a VMM. However, simply rebooting a VMM is undesirable because that needs rebooting operating systems on all VMs. In this paper, we propose a new technique for fast rejuvenation of VMMs called the warm-VM reboot. The warm-VM reboot enables efficiently rebooting only a VMM by suspending and resuming VMs without accessing the memory images. To achieve this, we have developed two mechanisms: on-memory suspend/ resume of VMs and quick reload of VMMs. The warm- VM reboot reduces the downtime and prevents the performance degradation due to cache misses after the reboot