Fast, Lightweight Virtual Machine Checkpointing

Virtual machine checkpoints provide a clean encapsulation of the full state of an executing system. Due to the large nature of state involved, the process of VM checkpoints can be slow and costly. We describe the implementation of a fast and lightweight mechanism of VM checkpointing for the Xen virtualization machine monitor that utilizes copy-on-write techniques to reduce the VM’s downtime and performance overhead incurred by other forms of VM checkpointing