Modeling and analyzing server system with rejuvenation through SysML and stochastic reward nets

High-availability assurance of server systems is becoming an important issue, since many mission-critical applications are implemented on server systems. To achieve high-availability, software rejuvenation is a practical technique to reduce unexpected downtime caused by software aging in software applications running on server systems. Although analytic models of software rejuvenation are well-studied, such analysis is not used in server system administration due to the complexity of modeling. In this paper, we present an availability modeling method for server system with software rejuvenation based on SysML that is used to describe system configurations and maintenance operations semi-formally. The proposed approach allows system administrators, who do not have expertise in availability modeling, to design and study the effects of different rejuvenation policies deployed in server systems. To show the applicability of the proposed modeling and evaluation process, a case study of a web application server is presented. We show the correctness of our modeling method by comparing the conventional models for condition-based and time-based software rejuvenation. © 2011 IEEE.