Virtual machine time travel using continuous data protection and checkpointing

Abstract

Virtual machine (VM) time travel enables reverting a virtual machine's state, both transient and persistent, to past points in time. This capability can be used to improve virtual machine availability, to enable forensics on past VM states, and to recover from operator errors. We present an approach to virtual machine time travel which combines Continuous Data Protection (CDP) storage support with live-migration-based virtual machine checkpointing. In particular, we present a novel approach for CDP which enables efficient reverts of the storage state to past points in time and makes it possible to undo a revert, and this is achieved using a simple branched-temporal data structure. We also present a design and implementation of a simple live-migration-based checkpointing mechanism in Xen.