Piccolo: A Fast and Efficient Rollback System for Virtual Machine Clusters

摘要

Rollback is an effective technique to resume the system execution from a recorded intermediate state upon failures. However, in virtualized environments, rollback of a virtual machine cluster (VMC) produces high network traffic and long service disruption, consequentially imposing significant overhead both on network and applications. In this paper, we propose Piccolo, a fast and efficient rollback system, to restore a VMC from snapshot files over datacenter network. We exploit the similarity among VMC snapshots and leverage multicast to deliver the identical pages across VMs placed on disperse hosts, thereby bypassing transmission of a large number of unnecessary pages. In addition to presenting Piccolo, we detail its implementation, and evaluate it by a set of experiments. The results show that Piccolo could achieve a significant reduction in terms of total sent data, network traffic and rollback latency compared to the existing generic rollback techniques.