Abstract:

Based on the characteristics of diversity of virtual block devices and requirements for the capabilities of high availability and fault tolerance, we propose a mechanism of extending the generic snapshot capability for the virtual block devices(VBD) in virtual machine monitors for the mainstream virtual machine(VM) architectures. Based on the mechanism, we can provide uniform and extensible snapshot services for the multiple VBDs in the VM environments while avoiding taking much efforts in modifying the lowlevel multiple specific VBD drivers. Based on a Linux system, we have extended the generic snapshot capability for QEMU to prove the feasibility of the extending mechanism, and have measured and analyzed the effects that snapshot brings to the VM performance through our experiments.

Key words: virtual machine monitor；virtual block device；snapshot；high availability