On improvement of cloud virtual machine availability with virtualization fault tolerance mechanism

Virtualization, particularly in the field of cloud computing, is a common strategy to improve existing computing resources. Hadoop, one of the Apache projects, is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage capabilities. However, how to guarantee both stability and reliability of virtualization have become important topics. In this article, to reach this goal we used current open-source software and platforms, for instance, the Xen-Hypervisor virtualization technology, and the OpenNebula virtual machines management tool. After extending components capabilities, we developed a mechanism to support our ideas and reached high availability with Hadoop that is also called as virtualization fault tolerance (VFT). We considered a practical problem, i.e., the single-point-of-failure issue that occurs frequently in virtualization systems, and the experimental results confirm that the downtime interval can be greatly shortened even if failure occurred. As a result, VFT is useful not only for Hadoop applications, but also for more areas in cluster-based systems.