A component-based approach to distributed system management: a use case with self-manageable J2EE clusters

Abstract

Clustering has become a de facto standard to scale distributed systems and applications. However, the administration and management of such systems still use ad-hoc techniques that partially fulfill the needs. The expertise needed to configure and tune these systems goes beyond the capacity of a single system administrator or software developer.We present a modular software infrastructure to build command and control loops to manage large scale distributed systems. Our approach uses a reflective component model in a systematic way for building a system model and every single stage in the supervision loop. This approach offers modularity, easy configuration, dynamic reconfiguration, as well as reusability. We illustrate how this architecture can be used to build self-manageable J2EE application server clusters.