A Fast Rejuvenation Technique for Server Consolidation with Virtual Machines

Abstract

As server consolidation using virtual machines (VMs) is carried out, software aging of virtual machine monitors (VMMs) is becoming critical. Performance degradation or crash failure of a VMM affects all VMs on it. To counteract such software aging, a proactive technique called software rejuvenation has been proposed. A typical example of rejuvenation is to reboot a VMM. However, simply rebooting a VMM is undesirable because that needs rebooting operating systems on all VMs. In this paper, we propose a new technique for fast rejuvenation of VMMs called the warm-VM reboot. The warm-VM reboot enables efficiently rebooting only a VMM by suspending and resuming VMs without accessing the memory images. To achieve this, we have developed two mechanisms: on-memory suspend/resume of VMs and quick reload of VMMs. The warm- VM reboot reduces the downtime and prevents the performance degradation due to cache misses after the reboot.