Storage writes in a mirrored virtual machine system

• Main Authors: TWICHELL BRIAN C, MEALEY BRUCE G, MCNEENEY ADAM, NORTH GERAINT
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 10.02.2015
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

Performing storage writes in a mirrored virtual machine system by receiving a state of a primary virtual machine during execution of an application, wherein the primary virtual machine runs on a first physical machine and a secondary virtual machine runs on a second physical machine, wherein the state is captured by checkpointing, and the primary virtual machine is configured to write data to a first block and concurrently write the data to a write buffer on the secondary virtual machine. The method also includes storing a copy of data within a second block to a rollback buffer for the secondary virtual machine, in response to identifying a checkpoint in the application, merging the rollback buffer with the write buffer, in response to detecting a failover, writing a copy of the rollback buffer to the disk storage, and continuing execution on the secondary virtual machine from the last checkpoint.