Availability Modeling and Analysis of a Virtualized System

This paper develops an availability model of a virtualized system. We construct non-virtualized and virtualized two hosts system models using a two-level hierarchical approach in which fault trees are used in the upper level and homogeneous continuous time Markov chains (CTMC) are used to represent sub-models in lower level. In the models, we incorporate not only hardware failures (e.g., CPU, memory, power, etc) but also software failures including virtual machine monitor (VMM), virtual machine (VM), and application failures. We also incorporate high availability (HA) service and VM live migration in the virtualized system. Metrics we use are system steady state availability, downtime in minutes per year and capacity oriented availability.