A tool to simplify the management of homogeneous and heterogeneous grids

To simplify computer management, several system administrators are adopting advanced techniques to manage software configuration on grids, but the tight coupling between hardware and software makes every PC an individual managed entity, lowering the scalability and increasing the costs to manage hundreds or thousands of PCs. This paper discusses the feasibility of a distributed virtual machine environment, named Flexlab: a new approach for computer management that combines virtualization and distributed system architectures as the basis of a management system. Flexlab is able to extend the coverage of a computer management solution beyond client operating system limitations and also offers a convenient hardware abstraction, decoupling software and hardware, simplifying computer management. The results obtained in this work indicate that FlexLab is able to overcome the limitations imposed by the coupling between software and hardware, simplifying the management of homogeneous and heterogeneous grids.

[1]  Renato J. O. Figueiredo,et al.  Distributed file system support for virtual machines in grid computing , 2004, Proceedings. 13th IEEE International Symposium on High performance Distributed Computing, 2004..

[2]  Renato J. O. Figueiredo,et al.  VMPlants: Providing and Managing Virtual Machine Execution Environments for Grid Computing , 2004, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE SC2004 Conference.

[3]  Tim Roughgarden,et al.  The price of stability for network design with fair cost allocation , 2004, 45th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[4]  Renato J. O. Figueiredo,et al.  Distributed File System Virtualization Techniques Supporting On-Demand Virtual Machine Environments for Grid Computing , 2006, Cluster Computing.

[5]  Marcos Antonio Cavenaghi,et al.  The Application of Distributed Virtual Machines for Enterprise Computer Management: A Two-Tier Network File System for Image Provisioning and Management , 2008, 2008 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference.