SWARE: An approach to support software aging and rejuvenation experiments

Abstract

The need for uninterrupted computing services demands for high system availability and reliability. Techniques and methods to estimate and analyze system dependability are essential to support software deployment and maintenance. Software aging appears as a relevant issue in this context. Software aging is a cumulative process which leads long-running systems to hangs or failures. Software rejuvenation is used to counteract software aging. Software rejuvenation usually comprises system reboot or application restart to bringing software to a stable fresh state. This paper proposes an approach to investigate software aging effects and software rejuvenation effectiveness on a single experiment. The approach has three phases: (i) Stress Phase - stress environment with the accelerated workload to induce bugs activation; (ii) Wait Phase - stop workload submission to observe the system state after workload submission; (iii) Rejuvenation Phase - find the impacts caused by the software rejuvenation. We named our approach as SWARE (Stress-Wait-Rejuvenation). To validate the SWARE approach, we present a case study. This case study consists of an experiment of VM Live Migration as rejuvenation mechanism for VMM software aging. The considered testbed is a Private Cloud with OpenNebula and KVM 1.0. The obtained results show that VM live migration is useful as rejuvenation for VMM software aging.