Optimized Computing and Communications (OC2) LabWestern Engineering

OpenSAF: High availability and management middleware for service availability forum

OpenSAF is a high availability (HA) and management middleware that implements service availability forum (SA Forum) standard specifications. It is an open source software actively supported by leading companies in the communications and enterprise computing industries. OpenSAF has evolved through different versions. Each version of OpenSAF introduces new bug fixes and stability with no changes in the installing and configuration setups. OpenSAF provisions high availability cluster from controller and payload nodes. Controller nodes mainly execute the Availability Management Framework that manages all other payload nodes. Payload nodes are the nodes on which the highly available application software will be running its entities. Installing and configuring the workstations (PCs or VMs) to their roles have been a hassle and time consuming procedure. Moreover, the manual configuration of OpenSAF cluster (HA cluster) hinders the elastic sizing of the HA application in real-time.  

Automating installation and deployment OpenSAF is a key enabler for on-demand cluster sizing for HA applications and services. Moreover, it will assure that cluster size is maintained when nodes failed to be recovered from errors. In our project, we used different technologies (MySQL DB, Puppet, JAVA programming, and Ruby scripts) to facilitate the automated deployment of OpenSAF and to assure the cluster resizing without any service interruption. Furthermore, the project will be extended to be integrated with cloud management platforms and HA-aware software management systems to provide a complete solution for elastic deployment of HA-application in cloud. Currently a fully functional prototype have been development and a test bed have been implement to demonstrate an elastic deployment of an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). The test bed consists of OpenIMS core with modified entities, HA proxy, MySQL DB, Puppet, IMS Bench SIPp, and the tool we have developed.

High-availability (HA) cluster architecture

OpenSAF High-availability architecture

OpenSAF UI Sample

User Interface sample for OpenSAF

Contact:

Hassan Hawilo (M.E.Sc candidate)