Experimental evaluation of distributed middleware with a virtualized Java environment

Abstract

The correctness and performance of large scale service oriented systems depend on distributed middleware components performing various communication and coordination functions. It is, however, very difficult to experimentally assess such middleware components, as interesting behavior often arises exclusively in large scale settings, but such deployments are costly and time consuming. We address this challenge with Minha, a system that virtualizes multiple JVM instances within a single JVM while simulating key environment components, thus reproducing the concurrency, distribution, and performance characteristics of the actual system. The usefulness of Minha is demonstrated by applying it to the WS4D Java stack, a popular implementation of the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification.