Hypervisor-Based Efficient Proactive Recovery

Proactive recovery is a promising approach for building fault and intrusion tolerant systems that tolerate an arbitrary number of faults during system lifetime. This paper investigates the benefits that a virtualization-based replication infrastructure can offer for implementing proactive recovery. Our approach uses the hypervisor to initialize a new replica in parallel to normal system execution and thus minimizes the time in which a proactive reboot interferes with system operation. As a consequence, the system maintains an equivalent degree of system availability without requiring more replicas than a traditional replication system. Furthermore, having the old replica available on the same physical host as the rejuvenated replica helps to optimize state transfer. The problem of remote transfer is reduced to remote validation of the state in the frequent case when the local replica has not been corrupted.