A Case for High Availability in a Virtualized Environment (HAVEN)

Abstract

The cost and operational complexity of traditional High Availability solutions has limited their widespread adoption. Virtualization allows availability properties to be associated with the system architecture, rather than depending on the intrinsic reliability of components. This paper introduces an extensible grammar that classifies the states and transitions of virtual machine images. From this grammar, rules for recovery and High Availability can be created which define how virtualization allows for simplified fault tolerance, making HAVENs accessible to the mainstream user.