  A key strategy to build disaster-resilient clouds is to employ backups of
virtual machines in a geo-distributed infrastructure. Today, the continuous and
acknowledged replication of virtual machines in different servers is a service
provided by different hypervisors. This strategy guarantees that the virtual
machines will have no loss of disk and memory content if a disaster occurs, at
a cost of strict bandwidth and latency requirements. Considering this kind of
service, in this work, we propose an optimization problem to place servers in a
wide area network. The goal is to guarantee that backup machines do not fail at
the same time as their primary counterparts. In addition, by using
virtualization, we also aim to reduce the amount of backup servers required.
The optimal results, achieved in real topologies, reduce the number of backup
servers by at least 40%. Moreover, this work highlights several characteristics
of the backup service according to the employed network, such as the
fulfillment of latency requirements.
