Abstract

Various industries such as telecommunication, banking etc. require un-interrupted services throughout the year. The requirement takes into account the system maintenance and the upgrade operations. The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) solution enables high availability of services even during the maintenance and the upgrade operation. This solution enables portability of application across various platforms.
The SA Forum defined a service - Software Management Framework (SMF) that orchestrates the upgrade of SA Forum managed system. To perform an upgrade SMF requires an upgrade campaign. The solutions proposed in SMF are applicable only for the application layer but not for the lower layers such as Operating Systems and the virtualization facilities which include Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Managers. On the other hand, the work done previously within the MAGIC project for the automatic generation of an upgrade campaign is limited to application entities only.
The objective of this thesis is to propose solutions in the context of SMF for the upgrade of lower layers as well without impacting the availability of services. To accomplish this objective we proposed three new upgrade steps that properly handle the dependencies between the layers of a machine during the upgrade. We also devised an approach for the automatic generation of an upgrade campaign for lower layers. The extended SMF is capable of executing the generated upgrade campaign for upgrading the virtualization facilities which include VMs capable of live migration as well. The upgrade campaign generation approach has been implemented in a prototype tool as an eclipse plug-in and tested with a case study.