Combined Server Rejuvenation in a Virtualized Data Center

This paper presents a high-availability solution to a virtualized data center which consists of a cluster of physical servers and hosted virtual machines (VMs). VMs are typically generated through software called virtual machine monitor (VMM) running on physical servers. Both VMs and VMMs face the risks of software aging which are caused by aging-related bugs in the software and may result in failures in long time execution. To prevent such failures proactively, we propose a combined server rejuvenation technique that performs VM rejuvenations simultaneously with VMM rejuvenation. In order to maximize the resource utilization of the data center, the placement of VMs in the data center is rearranged by live VM migration each time when VMM rejuvenation is performed. Through the simulation experiments, we show that the proposed technique can enhance the availability of VMs in a virtualized data center while achieving high resource utilization.