Adapting grid computing environments dependable with virtual machines: design, implementation, and evaluations

Due to its potential, using virtual machines in grid computing is attracting increasing attention. Most of the researches focus on how to create or destroy a virtual execution environments for different kinds of applications, while the policy of managing the virtual environments is not widely discussed. This paper proposes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an adaptive and dependable virtual execution environment for grid computing, ADVE, which focuses on the policy of managing virtual machines in grid environments. To build a dependable virtual execution environments for grid applications, ADVE provides an set of adaptive policies managing virtual machine, such as when to create and destroy a new virtual execution environment, when to migrate applications from one virtual execution environment to a new virtual execution environment. We conduct experiments over a cluster to evaluate the performance of ADVE, and the experimental results show that ADVE can improve the throughput and the reliability of grid resources with the adaptive management of virtual machines.