Abstract:
Worldwide, businesses continually increase
their dependence on IT systems for routine business
processes. The business processes which directly
rely on information systems and the supporting IT
infrastructure often require high levels of
availability and recovery in the case of planned
and unplanned outage. High availability has
achieved by host per host redundancy, a highly
expensive method with hardware and human costs.
Virtualization technologies promise cost reduction
through resource consolidation. By combining
virtualization and HA clustering, it is possible to
benefit from increased manageability and saving
from server consolidation through virtualization
without decreasing uptime of critical services.
Using analytical modeling, we analyze multiple
design choices when dual physical servers are used
to host multiple virtual machines. We use Markov
decision process when we are concerned about
optimal decision at any arbitrary time. Numerical
examples are presented to illustrate the
applicability of the model.
