Autoconfiguration of enterprise-class application deployment in virtualized infrastructure using OVF activation mechanisms

IT-based services existing today, such as the ones supporting e-commerce systems or corporate applications, demand complex architectures to address enterprise-class requirements (high availability, vast user demand, etc.). In particular, most enterprise-class applications are multi-tiered and multi-node, i.e. composed of many independent systems with complex relationships among them. In recent years, virtualization technologies have brought many advantages to enterprise-class application implementation, such as cost consolidation and ease of management. However, even when using virtualization, the configuration operations associated to the deployment of enterprise-class applications are still a challenging task since they constitute a mostly manual, time-consuming and error prone process. In this paper we propose a solution to that problem based on the automation of that procedure by means of the OVF activation mechanism. Our work focuses on a practical case, which has been used to assess the feasibility of our solution and to extract valuable lessons that we expose as part of the article.