Dissertaç ˜ao de Mestrado Mestrado em Engenharia Informática Jo ...

Summary
Among the information technology sectors is the virtualization sector, which stands out by
being a very active area, with many collaborations and advances. Virtualization’s benefits are
plenty. Some of them are the massive server consolidation, reduced cooling, structural and
electrical costs and the isolation between virtual machines.
Virtual appliance is a concept resulting from the advancements on virtualization, and de-
fines an alternative software distribution model from those existing by then, such as the tradi-
tional CD-ROM distribution, software as a service and hardware appliances. This model allows
customers to have their IT solution fully specified and optimized for the task it must perform.
With the virtual appliance outbreak, many servers using different applications tend to
gather on the same physical machine. The applications, in turn, may implement plenty config-
uration formats, from widely adopted standards to proprietary formats. The configuration of
these applications is typically carried by busy system administrators, who must dedicate some
of their time coping such a vast configuration format range.
This thesis contributes for the nourishing of the virtual appliance concept and proposes
the creation of a tool which automatically configures applications inside virtual appliances,
regardless of the application being configured. The contributions on this area are, therefore,
very rare, which elevates this dissertation to a pioneer of the area.
The approach for the problem of automatic application configuration explores the frequently
found patterns in configuration files. Typically, those files use similar concepts, such as parame-
ter definitions, parameter blocks and comments. Besides this, only some files were found to im-
plement other concepts, although on a punctual basis. This dissertation proposes a framework
for the automatic configuration of applications based on this characteristic. A configuration
file is transformed to a structured and application-independent language, like the eXtended
Markup Language, which is then modified and reverted to its original syntax.
Keywords: Virtual appliance, automatic application configuration
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