Software Rejuvenation Model for Cloud Computing Platform

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most needed technologies that houses software systems and relevant functional entities resulting in complex, multiuser, multitasking and virtualized environments. However, reliability of such high performance computing systems depends both on hardware and software. Virtualization is the technology that many cloud service providers rely on for efficient management and coordination of the resource pool. The software systems, during operation accumulate errors or garbage leading to software aging which may lead to system failure and associated consequences. Software aging needs to be dealt with specialized techniques to facilitate continuous service delivery. To deal with software aging, a technique called software rejuvenation exists that reboots or re-initiates the software to avoid fault or failure. As cloud service run on virtual environments, impacts of aging in virtual environments needs to be addressed. The VMs run on a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) also called as hypervisor which is liable to suffer failures or hangs due to software aging. This paper explores how the aging of Virtual Machine monitors can be addressed. Once the aging patterns of VMM are detected, the Virtual Machines running on it are migrated to healthy VMM; aged VMM is rejuvenated and VMs are migrated back. After rejuvenation, the hypervisor supports the operation of VMs in an improved state.