Mega Virtual Machine Session Data Replication for High Availability
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing virtual machine designs fail to provide telecom-grade high availability, leading to significant downtime when a hardware appliance becomes unavailable or a virtual machine crashes, as they require complete mirroring of the virtual machine, which is resource-intensive and does not protect against service-level faults.
Innovation Solution
A virtual machine manager replicates session data across multiple hardware appliances within a mega virtual machine, allowing any appliance to resume service in case of failure, thus providing high availability without the need for complete mirroring and reducing downtime.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If complete mirroring of the virtual machine is implemented to ensure high availability, then service reliability is improved, but resource consumption and system complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the virtual machine state into two distinct parts: session data (critical for service continuity) and non-session data (less critical). Only the essential session data is replicated across hardware appliances, while complete VM mirroring is avoided. This segmentation enables high availability by preserving necessary service state without the overhead of duplicating entire virtual machine images.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and isolates the critical session data from the complete virtual machine state. By identifying and separating the specific data elements necessary for service continuity (session data) from the rest of the VM configuration and state, the system replicates only this extracted subset across multiple hardware appliances, reducing complexity while maintaining reliability.
2Reliability
If complete mirroring of the virtual machine is implemented to ensure high availability, then service reliability is improved, but resource overhead increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the virtual machine state into session data and non-session data, replicating only the essential session data portion across hardware appliances. This selective replication of segmented data reduces the quantity of data that must be stored and transmitted, thereby reducing resource overhead while maintaining service availability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies partial action by replicating only the necessary subset of virtual machine state (session data) rather than performing complete VM mirroring. This partial replication provides sufficient redundancy for high availability while consuming fewer computational and storage resources compared to full mirroring approaches.
3Reliability
If session data is replicated across multiple hardware appliances, then service continuity is improved during failures, but data synchronization complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the critical session data from the complete virtual machine state for replication purposes. By identifying and isolating this specific data subset, the system simplifies the synchronization process compared to managing complete VM state replication, as the scope of data requiring synchronization is reduced to only the essential session information.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary identification and extraction of session data before replication occurs. By pre-defining what constitutes critical session data and preparing it for replication in advance, the system reduces the complexity of real-time synchronization during failure scenarios, as the data ready for replication has already been identified and isolated.
Data Source
AI summary
According to some embodiments, a virtual machine manager is operable to manage a virtual machine (VM) that spans a plurality of hardware appliances. The virtual machine manager receives a request to provide a service to a device, selects an application instance to provide the service to the device, and forwards the request for the service to the selected application instance. The selected application instance is running in an instance of the virtual machine associated with a first hardware appliance. The virtual machine manager determines session data associated with the service and provides the session data associated with the service to a second hardware appliance of the VM in order to enable the VM to provide high availability of the service to the device.