Xen Management with SmartFrog

Applications to be executed onmultipurpose Grids frequently have very specific resource requirements (platform, kernel, operating systems, libraries, memory, CPU, etc.) and need to be delegated part of the resource control. Typical Grid sites offer a limited range of resource types, inhibiting the range of applications that can be supported; and Grid node managers are bound to maintain their servers according to users requirements. To address these problems, we introduce Smart-Domains, which combines the high performance virtual machine technology provided by Xen, with automatic deployment of Xen virtual machines using the Smart Frog configuration and deployment framework. SmartDomains automatically deploys distributed, synchronized pools of custom-configured Xen virtual machines and manages them through their lifecycle as a single coherent distributed execution environment. SmartDomains uses a representation of the complete distributed resources specifications, including information about how to sequence their creation and removal. We discuss SmartDomains test cases at CERN for distributed testbeds and Grid execution nodes.

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