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

6. INTEGRATION WITH VIRTU 6.2. VIRTU Top-Level Analysis
Aware of this market shift, Evolve Space Solutions proposed VIRTU, a platform for the
creation and management of virtual machines. Before that, the GoVI virtualization tool was
developed for the European Space Agency in order to deal with some outstanding problems
in their IT infrastructure, such as the large number of underutilized machines, great demand
for isolation and a myriad of different hardware platforms. The development on VIRTU ini-
tially took on the GoVI infrastructure as a starting point, but eventually evolved to become an
independent project, dettached from the former.
VIRTU explores interoperability between virtualization solutions, such as Xen [Cit09] or
VMware [VMw09]. One way to achieve portability of VMs among different virtualization plat-
forms is to resort to virtualization standards. Open Virtual Machine Format (see Section 2.1.3),
which is being developed by the biggest virtualization players, is one of such standards and
VIRTU might evolve to support it.
Another big opportunity in the virtualization area is the fact that application configuration
is still largely a manual task. The complexity of configuring a system with manifold applica-
tions, employing different configuration formats, can be frightening for a system administrator.
This complexity is only magnified when dealing with a huge system, composed of hundreds,
or even thousands of such systems. To ease the system maintenance burden, VIRTU proposes
the generic automatic application configuration or, in other words, the ability to configure any
application, regardless of its vendor or configuration representation, on the most autonomous
and automatic manner.
The framework presented by this dissertation, SmART, is the Universidade Nova de Lisboa
contribution for project VIRTU. Once SmART was completed, it was integrated with the whole
VIRTU tool.
6.2 VIRTU Top-Level Analysis
The VIRTU tool [Sol09b] implements the concept of Assembly Instance, which refers to
one, or a set of virtual machines that the users will use and manage directly. An Assembly
Instance results from the instantiation of an Assembly Configuration, which contains
the information used to generate one VM, or a set of VMs. To each VM in an Assembly
Configuration corresponds a Virtual Machine Configuration and when an
Assembly Configuration is instanced, its VM Configurations are also instanced into
VM Instances. Each Virtual Machine Configuration is a combination of Building
Blocks and Publication Files. A Building Block is a template element, such as
an operating system, application or virtual machine, whereas a Publication File con-
tains the desired configuration of a Building Block. In order to re-use previously existing
Assembly Configurations, it is also possible for Assembly Configurations to con-
tain other Assembly Configurations. The VIRTU Assembly Configuration model is
depicted in Figure 6.1.
The configuration of an Assembly Instance is carried at the level of its VM Instances.
Inside a VM Instance resides a process which is ran at every VM boot and, for each
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