Virtual Services

The Virtual Services is a framework for deploying virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is a pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software application packaged with the operating system inside a virtual machine. In the context of Grid the use of virtual appliances allows to dramatically simplify the process of node configuration and tasks distribution.

The Virtual Services toolkit allows to dynamically manage virtual appliances that may span on several nodes of a computational cluster. These multi-node appliances are referred as virtual clusters. Virtual Services is responsible for establishing networking between the nodes of the virtual cluster and providing the point of entry for the end-user.

With the help of the vcluster gridbean users may create custom virtual environment, specifying the file system image to be used on virtual machines and the amount of hardware resources to be reserved for virtual cluster. If successful, the gridbean reports the configuration of newly created cluster and user may seamlessly access and utilize the virtual cluster just like a regular one, including running parallel applications inside of the virtual cluster.

The key features of the Virtual Services framework are:

The use of cluster systems as hardware layer.
Tools to create a virtual clusters> on a set of virtual machines.
Automatic management of share of resources available to services.
UNICORE compatible interface.

The implementation details are covered here:
Presentation (pdf)

The Virtual Service project is developed in the Program Systems Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

If you're interested in the Virtual Services functionality or want to participate in the development please contact developers.

Developer contacts:

Artem Pervin
Alexander Moskovsky

Related publications:

Dynamic Resources Management of Virtual Appliances on a Computational Cluster.: A. Moskovsky, A. Pervin, B. Walker
Proceedings of 3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC'08), Springer LNCS, Euro-Par 2008 Workshop proceedings, to appear

Status:

The Virtual Services is in development (January 2009).