Grid Virtualization Engine: Providing Virtual Resources for Grid Infrastructure

Abstract

Virtual machines offer a lot of advantage such as easy configuration and management and can simplify the development and the deployment of Grid infrastructures. Various virtualization implementations despite have similar functions often provide different management and access interfaces. The heterogeneous virtualization technologies bring challenges for employing virtual machine as computing resources to build Grid infrastructures. The work proposed in this paper focus on a Web service based virtual machine provider for Grid infrastructures. The Grid Virtualization Engine (GVE) creates an abstraction layer between users and underlying virtualization technologies. The GVE implements a scalable distributed architecture, where an GVE Agent represents a computing center. The Agent talks with different virtualization product inside the computing center and provides virtual machine resources to GVE Site Service. Users could require computing resources through GVE Site Services. The system is designed and implemented in the state of the arts of distributed computing: Web service and Grid standards.