Using Block Filter Device for Acceleration of Storage Synchronization on Fault-tolerant Virtual Machines

A fault-tolerant virtual machine (VM) system has the ability to continue its execution even when it encounters a failure. Such a system typically consists of a pair of VMs, the primary VM and the backup VM. The primary VM hosts user applications and continuously transfers its internal state to the backup VM, while the backup VM needs to perform failover upon a failure on primary VM. The synchronization efficiency of a fault-tolerant VM system is a major concern since the primary VM needs to stop execution of user applications to perform synchronization. This study focuses on the issue of disk synchronization efficiency for the fault-tolerant VM system, and proposes a new approach for efficient disk synchronization under the active-passive VM fault tolerance model. Our experimental results show that, the proposed approach has nearly the same performance as the shared-storage approach (the no-disk-synchronization approach).