Near-Zero-Downtime Single-Machine Hypervisor Rejuvenation

Abstract

In virtualized computing environments, hyper visors typically run for long periods of time. This makes hyper visors susceptible to process aging, which can lead to performance degradation or failure of both hyper visors and their virtual machines (VMs). An approach to counteract process aging is software rejuvenation. Rejuvenation of a hyper visor on a single machine is usually performed by suspending and resuming the VMs, which has the disadvantage that the VMs become unavailable during hyper visor restart. In this paper, we propose an approach to rejuvenate a Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) hyper visor on a single machine without suspending its VMs so that TCP connections are not affected. The paper provides initial experimental results showing the feasibility of our approach.