This maintenance common guest service provides a means of guest heartbeat orchestration under VIM (system management) control. 1. Packaging and Initialization: The packaging of the heartbeat daemon and heartbeat_init script are modified: a. image.inc and filter_out packaging files are modified to exclude the heartbeat daemon from being packaged on the controller. b. because the heartbeat daemon is still packaged on the compute heartbeat_init script is modified to prevent the heartbeat daemon from being spawned on the compute host. 2. Compute Function: Heartbeats the guest and reports failures. Package: cgts-mtce-common-guestServer-1.0-r54.0.x86_64.rpm Binary: /usr/local/bin/guestServer Init: /etc/init.d/guestServer Managed: /etc/pmon.d/guestServer.pmon 3. Controller Function: Guest heartbeat control and event proxy Package: cgts-mtce-common-guestAgent-x.x-rxx.x86_64.rpm Binary: /usr/local/bin/guestAgent Init: /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/platform/guestAgent Managed: by SM The heartbeat daemon that did run on the controller is replaced by a new guestAgent daemon performing the following functions a. HTTP Command Receiver : to which the VIM sends instance control commands. b. HTTP Event Transmitter: to which the daemon can send instance failure events and state query commands to the VIM. c. State query audit Behavioral Executive Summary: The guestServer daemon (on the compute) listens for (using inotify) 'uuid' UNIX named heartbeat communication channels that nova:libvirt creates and opens in /var/lib/libvirt/qemu whenever an instance is created. Example: /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/cgcs.heartbeat.02e172a9-aeae-4cef-a6bc-7eb9de7825d6.sock The guestServer connects (and auto reconnects) to these channels when they are created or modified and disconnects from them when deleted. Once connected, the guestServer listens for TCP messages over that UNIX named socket. If a guest supports heartbeating then it will run the heartbeat_init script during its initialization process. Once the heartbeat daemon is running it will periodically send init request messages to the libvirt pipe that, on the host side, the guestServer is listening for. on receipt of an init message, the guestServer will extract name, timeout and corrective action info from it and then send back an 'init_ack' followed by a continuous heartbeat cycle consisting of sending a 'challenge' request messages and expecting a correct computational responses within a guest specified heartbeat window. Failure to comply will result in a corrective action that was specified in the init message from the guest. The VIM is responsible for enabling and disabling heartbeat fault reporting as well as taking the guest specified corrective action in he event of a heartbeat failure.