Availability study on cloud computing environments: Live migration as a rejuvenation mechanism

TLDR

Cloud computing adoption has increased, making high availability more critical, and software rejuvenation is a key mechanism to enhance system availability. The study proposes a comprehensive availability model to assess using live migration for VMM rejuvenation while minimizing service interruption. Live migrations are triggered by time‑based thresholds, and the model evaluates five scenarios with varying trigger intervals. The results demonstrate that live migration significantly reduces system downtime.

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of cloud computing environments, studies about high availability in those systems became more and more significant. Software rejuvenation is an important mechanism to improve system availability. This paper presents a comprehensive availability model to evaluate the utilization of the live migration mechanism to enable VMM rejuvenation with minimum service interruption. Live migrations are performed observing a time-based trigger. We evaluate five different scenarios, with distinct time intervals for triggering the rejuvenation. The results show that the live migration can significantly reduce the system downtime.