Live replication of virtual machines
Violeta Medina, Juan Manuel García-Samaniego · International Conference on Software Engineering · 2011
Replication has been identified as a useful mechanism in Virtual Machine (VM) management. Replication allows the network administrators to face some daily troubles like system faults, load balancing and scheduled/unscheduled maintenances. A desirable characteristic during this process is zero downtime, the replication process should cause a minimal service interruption if a Virtual Machine becomes unavailable. Replication has been identified as a tool to achieve high availability in a computational system. In this paper a live replication protocol to reach high availability in services for virtual machines is proposed. It consists on replicating every task that a virtual machine executes to other virtual machine. Each individual result that is obtained in a virtual machine called original is also obtained in a Virtual Machine called replica. The protocol is based on TCP/IP. This mechanism duplicates each command that the original virtual machine receives and sends it to the replica virtual machine.