Management of High Quality Available Services Using Virtualization

This paper addresses the use of virtualization technology in the management of high availability services using open source tools. Services are set up on virtual machines and can be migrated between physical nodes of a "cluster" system automatically with the help of a corresponding program. The work of this thesis is based on an open source program called Heartbeat. We will then propose a solution and create the corresponding code that will allow the Heartbeat program to migrate virtual machines from one physical cluster node to another. This migration is required to be performed at the time the first node is lowered from us to perform foreseen maintenance. The solution we propose will be tested in an experimental system set up by us where we will measure the impact that migration has on system network performance. On the practical side we will use Xen virtualization, which we will install on a Linux system Centos version 7. On Linux we will configure Xen and on the latter will be set up two other Centos 7. On two Virtual Centos 7 servers mounted on Xen will install heartbeat to simulate failover of a simple web page to be built on Apache installed on two Centos 7 servers. With this thesis we aim to achieve the following objectives: (1) Provide a detailed overview of previous work on the use of virtualization in critical service clusters. (2) Propose and implement a solution that enables the Heartbeat program to migrate virtual machines from one physical cluster node to another. (3) Evaluate system performance when migrating virtual machines from one node to another