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Availability Analysis of Application Servers Using Software Rejuvenation and Virtualization

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Abstract

Demands on software reliability and availability have increased tremendously due to the nature of present day applications. We focus on the aspect of software for the high availability of application servers since the unavailability of servers more often originates from software faults rather than hardware faults. The software rejuvenation technique has been widely used to avoid the occurrence of unplanned failures, mainly due to the phenomena of software aging or caused by transient failures. In this paper, first we present a new way of using the virtual machine based software rejuvenation named VMSR to offer high availability for application server systems. Second we model a single physical server which is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) with the VMSR framework using stochastic modeling and evaluate it through both numerical analysis and SHARPE (Symbolic Hierarchical Automated Reliability and Performance Evaluator) tool simulation. This VMSR model is very general and can capture application server characteristics, failure behavior, and performability measures. Our results demonstrate that VMSR approach is a practical way to ensure uninterrupted availability and to optimize performance for aging applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering Department, Korea Aerospace University, 200-1, Hwajeon-Dong, Dukyang-Gu, Goyang City, Gyeonggi-Do, 412-791, Korea

    Thandar Thein & Jong Sou Park (Member, IEEE)

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  1. Thandar Thein
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  2. Jong Sou Park
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Correspondence to Thandar Thein.

Additional information

This research was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD) under Grant No. KRF2007-210-D00006.

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Thein, T., Sou Park, J. Availability Analysis of Application Servers Using Software Rejuvenation and Virtualization. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 24, 339–346 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-009-9228-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-009-9228-1

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