High availability using virtualization - 3RC

TL;DR

This paper presents 3RC, a virtualization-based high availability system that reduces costs by enabling virtual machine mobility and rapid recovery across data center servers.

Contribution

It introduces a finite state machine approach for high availability, allowing virtual machine migration, restart, and reinstallation with minimal downtime.

Findings

The 3RC system effectively manages virtual machine redundancy.

The infrastructure enables rapid OS and middleware installation.

The SNS-PISA data center operates fully virtualized with high availability.

Abstract

High availability has always been one of the main problems for a data center. Till now high availability was achieved by host per host redundancy, a highly expensive method in terms of hardware and human costs. A new approach to the problem can be offered by virtualization. Using virtualization, it is possible to achieve a redundancy system for all the services running on a data center. This new approach to high availability allows the running virtual machines to be distributed over a small number of servers, by exploiting the features of the virtualization layer: start, stop and move virtual machines between physical hosts. The 3RC system is based on a finite state machine, providing the possibility to restart each virtual machine over any physical host, or reinstall it from scratch. A complete infrastructure has been developed to install operating system and middleware in a few minutes. To virtualize the main servers of a data center, a new procedure has been developed to migrate physical to virtual hosts. The whole Grid data center SNS-PISA is running at the moment in virtual environment under the high availability system.