Enhancing Reliability for Virtual Machines via Continual Migration

Our approach is to design and implement a continual migration strategy for virtual machines to achieve automatic failure recovery. By continually and transparently propagating virtual machine´s state to a backup host via live migration techniques, trivial applications encapsulated in the virtual machine can be recovered from hardware failures with minimal downtime while no modifications are required. Deployment agility is considered so that initiating continual migration can be done with no time consuming preparations. Experimental results show that virtual machine in a continual migration system can be recovered in less than one second after a failure is detected, while performance impact to the protected virtual machine can be reduced to 30%.