Devirtualizable virtual machines enabling general, single-node, online maintenance

Maintenance is the dominant source of downtime at high availability sites. Unfortunately, the dominant mechanism for reducing this downtime, cluster rolling upgrade, has two shortcomings that have prevented its broad acceptance. First, cluster-style maintenance over many nodes is typically performed a few nodes at a time, making maintenance slow and often impractical. Second, cluster-style maintenance does not work on single-node systems, despite the fact that their unavailability during maintenance can be painful for organizations. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for online maintenance that uses virtual machines to provide maintenance on single nodes, allowing parallel maintenance over multiple nodes, and online maintenance for standalone servers. We present the Microvisor, our prototype virtual machine system that is custom tailored to the needs of online maintenance. Unlike general purpose virtual machine environments that induce continual 10-20% overhead, the Microviso...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: David E. Lowell, Yasushi Saito, Eileen J. Samberg
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2004, Cluster-style Maintenance, Online Maintenance, Programming Languages, Virtual Machine