No Downtime Upgrade
I have had multiple conversations on software upgrade with a number of
customers and wanted to share this particular usage scenario of
virtualization technology. Software upgrade traditionally requires
- Delivery of new software to the embedded system
- Shutdown of service
- Shutdown of the system
- Installation of the new binaries
- Reboot of the system
- Restoration of service
Between 2 and 6 of course the system is ‘down’, no service is provided, which is a bad state for many embedded systems.
Virtualization
allows the user to run two virtual boards, on a single processor if
needed. Only one of these virtual boards is actively in service, the
other is dormant, it takes some memory space, but not processor time.