RECOVERING A VIRTUAL MACHINE AFTER FAILURE OF POST-COPY LIVE MIGRATION

摘要

Post-copy is one of the two key techniques (besides pre-copy) for live migration of virtual machines in data centers. Post-copy provides deterministic total migration time and low downtime for write-intensive VMs. However, if post-copy migration fails for any reason, the migrating VM is lost because the VM's latest consistent state is split between the source and destination nodes during migration. PostCopyFT provides a new approach to recover a VM after a destination or network failure during post-copy live migration using an efficient reverse incremental checkpointing mechanism. PostCopyFT was implemented and evaluated in the KVM/QEMU platform. Experimental results show that the total migration time of post-copy remains unchanged while maintaining low failover time, downtime, and application performance overhead.