This paper describes the emerging Software Management Framework of the Service Availability Forum (SAF). It defines the steps required for a software upgrade in a high availability system. Although the orchestration of the upgrade is an important task of the Framework, it is not the only one. It is essential that the software to be upgraded is made available to a target node and that there is some bookkeeping about which versions of software are available, on which nodes they are installed and which entities are configured to deploy them. This necessitates the definition of an information model for software management.
The Software Management Framework takes on the software upgrade issue from the perspective of SAF: SAF has defined the Availability Management Framework (AMF) and therefore the Software Management Framework assumes only AMF entities as highly available and uses AMF to handle the high availability issues of their upgrade. At the same time it is also suitable for controlling the upgrade of software which does not make use of AMF, however with no availability guarantees for them.