Is it possible to create a VM that survives outage of host?


Petr

This is just an academical question.

Is there any way from technical point of view to setup virtualization subsystem that would be able to survive (VM's would be still accessible and fully operational) even if the some parts of the physical cluster which it would live on fail?

I know it's possible to move VM from physical host to another host without having to restart it (I think Xen and also VM Ware supports this), but if the host dies before the migration, it's just dead. It can be copied to a different host and start there, but there is still some service disruption and VM has to start up again from scratch. Is there any way to set up a system that would be able to do this? Only thing that comes to my mind would be to have VM actually live on 2 physical hosts, while being "active" only on one of them, having its operating memory constantly mirrored somehow, but that would be probably very slow.

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'

What you describe is certainly possible.  Tandem Computers, Inc., now a division within Hewlett Packard, developed a redundant, fault-tolerant computer system called NonStop.  It was used in banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and zero data loss.  Representatives claimed that the only ways a NonStop system would crash would be massive physical damage (e.g., fire, flood, or earthquake) or a power failure.  (And of course those risks could be mitigated with distributed data centers and on-site backup electrical generators.)  NonStop would laugh at the failure of a single component (CPU, storage device, bus, etc.)

If you could virtualize a cluster of NonStop processors, using multiple hosts, you should be able to achieve the same non-stop availability characteristics as the original Tandem system.  This, per se, is easier said than done — NonStop used a proprietary CPU, and, AFAIK, the operating system is not available for free download.  But, in principle, it should be possible to do something like this.

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