Multi-perspective Evaluation of Self-Healing Systems Using Simple Probabilistic Models

In this paper we construct an evaluation framework for a self-healing system, VM-Rejuv – a virtual machine based rejuvenation scheme for web-application servers – using simple, yet powerful, proba-bilistic models that capture the behavior of its self-healing mech-anisms from multiple perspectives (designer, operator, and end-user). We combine these analytical models with runtime fault-injection to study the operation of VM-Rejuv, and use the results from the fault-injection experiments and model-analysis to reason about the efficacy of VM-Rejuv, its limitations and strategies for mitigating these limitations in system-deployments. Whereas we use VM-Rejuv as the subject of our evaluation in this paper, our main contribution is the demonstration of a practical evaluation ap-proach that can be generalized to other self-healing systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.4 [Performance of Systems]: Reliability, availability and ser-viceabilit