Fast and Scalable VMM Live Upgrade in Large Cloud Infrastructure
Xiantao Zhang, Xiao Zheng, Zhi Wang, Qi Lecky Li, Junkang Fu, Yang Zhang, Yibin Shen · 2019
High availability is the most important and challenging problem for cloud providers. However, virtual machine monitor (VMM), a crucial component of the cloud infrastructure, has to be frequently updated and restarted to add security patches and new features, undermining high availability. There are two existing live update methods to improve the cloud availability: kernel live patching and Virtual Machine (VM) live migration. However, they both have serious drawbacks that impair their usefulness in the large cloud infrastructure: kernel live patching cannot handle complex changes (e.g., changes to persistent data structures); and VM live migration may incur unacceptably long delays when migrating millions of VMs in the whole cloud, for example, to deploy urgent security patches.