Improving Fault Tolerance by Virtualization and Software Rejuvenation

The phenomenon that the state of software degrades with time is known as software aging. The primary method to fight aging is software rejuvenation. This paper presents new ways of effective software rejuvenation using virtualization for addressing software aging. This new approach is meant to be the less disruptive as possible for the running service and to get a zero downtime in most of the cases. We construct the state transition models to describe the behaviors of virtualized and non- virtualized application server. We map through the rejuvenation actions to this transition model with stochastic process and express availability, downtime and downtime costs in terms of the parameters in our models. Our results show that virtualization and software rejuvenation can be used to prolong the availability of the services.