Research And Design Of Fault Injection Platform For Virtualization System

Cloud computing is widely used in information systems, especially in financial services, telecommunications, energy sector. In these fields, a sys tem failure can result in huge losses. Virtualization is the core technology of cloud computing. The fault-tolerant capability evaluation of virtualized systems is significant. Fault injection is a key method to evaluate the fault-tolerant capability of systems.In this paper, we analyze the situation of virtualized systems’ fault injection studies, found that there were few researches on this area recently, and lack for available fault injection platforms. In response to these problems, we choose Xen virtualization system as an instance, design and implement a fault injection platform for virtualization systems. Our platform integrates a variety of fault injection tools. It has extensive fault types, good usability, large fault set, and automated testing capabilities. We have done a large number of evaluation experiments on Xen virtualization system using this platform. Then we analyzed the experimental results and give an evaluation of Xen virtualization system’s fault-tolerant capability. Our research also have a good reference value in the field of evaluating other virtualization systems’ fault-tolerant capability.The platform framework designed in this paper is divided into six modules: fault injection tools set module, load tools set module, user interaction module, fault injection tools manager module, load tools manager module, log manager module. These modules work together to form a complete automated test integration platform. The platform not only provides fault injection tools for system’s underlying hardware layer, which can inject CPU faults, memory fault s, file system faults, but also provides fault injection tools for system’s virtualization management layer, which can inject multiple faults for virtualization systems, like event channel faults, virtual machine migration faults, access control faults, me mory management faults, hardware resource allocation faults, status inquiry faults, other hypercall faults, etc. The evaluation framework model proposed in this paper has a good reference value.In this paper, we first research and analyze Xen virtualizati on technology, and then expounded the virtualization system fault injection principle and implementation technology, finally give an evaluation and analysis of Xen virtualization system’s fault-tolerant capability base on our experimental results.