Hybrid Adaptive Checkpointing for Virtual Machine Fault Tolerance

Active Virtual Machine (VM) replication is an application independent and cost-efficient mechanism for high availability and fault tolerance, with several recently proposed implementations based on checkpointing. However, these methods may suffer from large impacts on application latency, excessive resource usage overheads, and/or unpredictable behavior for varying workloads. To address these problems, we propose a hybrid approach through a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller to dynamically switch between periodic and on-demand check-pointing. Our mechanism automatically selects the method that minimizes application downtime by adapting itself to changes in workload characteristics. The implementation is based on modifications to QEMU, LibVirt, and OpenStack, to seamlessly provide fault tolerant VM provisioning and to enable the controller to dynamically select the best checkpointing mode. Our evaluation is based on experiments with a video streaming application, an e-commerce benchmark, and a software development tool. The experiments demonstrate that our adaptive hybrid approach improves both application availability and resource usage compared to static selection of a checkpointing method, with application performance gains and neglectable overheads.