Deploying and managing Xen sites with XSM

Abstract

Xen is becoming a de facto solution for virtualization with low performance overhead. Virtualization features include optimization in resources utilization, server consolidation, improved security and fault tolerance. Server consolidation is currently one of the main attractions of virtualization for enterprises. It enhances the scalability of a regular IT infrastructure, enabling the utilization of an amount of servers larger than the available physical machines. However, deploying and managing virtual machines in such environment can be a complex task. It is first necessary to install the virtualization layer, represented by the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor), on each physical machine. After that, the virtual machines can be deployed. Due to the possibility of having several virtual machines inside a single physical machine, an efficient management of the environment in order to enhance overall system performance and resources utilization is required. Considering these issues, we present in this paper the Xen Site Manager (XSM), a tool to facilitate the deployment and management of virtual sites based on Xen. It interacts with standard services and tools, such as SystemImager, DHCP, PXE and Ganglia, in order to provide high flexibility. We provide a detailed description of XSM architecture and present a performance evaluation of its deployment feature. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.