Virtual Machine Based Hot-Spare Fault-Tolerant System

Safety-critical systems have to work correctly and meet time constraints even in the presence of faults. Hardware fault-tolerant technology can provide a high level of reliability, but custom-designed hardware and operating system are too costly to be accepted by most common applications. At present, some research works about hot-spare fault-tolerant systems based on virtualization technology have been carried out, this method can provide a highly available system based entirely on commodity hardware and open-source operating systems. But how to control the overhead of main-backup synchronization, including space usage and time consumption is the most important thing need to consider. In this paper we present the framework of hot-spare fault-tolerant systems based on virtualization technology and analyse the procedure of main-back synchronization. We also discussed how to chose a proper strategy and opportunity of synchronization to ensure the recovery is exactly. We did several experiments to evaluate the performance of this system and the result proved our view point.