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| Providing Data Protection and Rapid Recovery With Virtual Machines | ||||
| Jeanna Matthews | On: | 9-Jan-2008 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM | ||
| Prof | At: | Watson Research Center (Yorktown), Room 26-014 | ||
| Clarkson University | Host: | Dilma Da Silva | ||
Abstract: Average computer users must constantly worry that opening the wrong attachment, clicking on the wrong link, or installing the wrong patch may render their system unusable. Few are prepared with tested backup and restore methods to undo the damage that these seemingly innocuous, everyday actions can cause. In this talk, I will describe an architecture, based on virtual machine technology, to provide data protection and rapid recovery of personal computer systems. To protect personal data, we house it in a file server virtual machine running on the same physical host and export portions of this data as needed to other virtual machines running on the same host. We introduce novel file system permissions such as read-rarely, that allows any data from a mountpoint to be read, but flags a violation in the case of an extensive scan. To protect system configuration state, applications are grouped into virtual machine appliances with associated contracts that express their expected behavior. We detect violations of these contracts and support rollback and patching of VM state as well as checkpointing of compromised state for forensic analysis. We have implemented prototypes of this system in both VMware and Xen and I will present initial data on the overheads associated with this architecture. Time permitting, I will also give a quick overview of some of the other virtualization related work going on at Clarkson including performance isolation testing, repeated research, and power testing. Speaker biography: Jeanna Neefe Matthews is an associate professor of Computer Science at Clarkson University (Potsdam, New York) where she leads several hands-on computing laboratories including the Clarkson Open Source Institute and Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory. Students in these labs and in her classes have been winners in a number of prestigious computing contests including the 2001, 2002 and 2004 IBM Linux Challenge, the 2005 IBM North American Grid Scholar's Challenge, the 2005 Unisys Tuxmaster competition and the 2006 VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge. Her research interests include virtualization, operating systems, computer networks and computer security. She is actively involved in the Association for Computing Machinery as treasurer of the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, editor of Operating Systems Review and as a member of the Executive Committee ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee, US-ACM. Jeanna received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. | ||||