Virtual cluster management with Xen

Abstract

Recently, virtualization of hardware resources to run multiple instances of independent virtual machines over physical hosts has gained popularity due to an industry-wide focus on the need to reduce the cost of operation of an enterprise computing infrastructure. Xen is an open source hypervisor that provides a virtual machine abstraction layer which is very similar to the underlying physical machine. Using multiple physical hosts, each hosting multiple virtual machines over a VMM like Xen, system administrators can setup a high-availability virtual cluster to meet the ever-increasing demands of their data centers. In such an environment, the Xen hypervisor enables live migration of individual virtual machine instances from one physical node to another without significantly affecting the performance of the applications running on a target virtual machine. This paper describes a scalable Virtual Cluster Manager that provides such application agnostic cluster management capabilities to the system administrators maintaining virtual clusters over Xen powered virtual nodes. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.