Abstract
Recently there has been an increased interest in the use of system-level
virtualization using mature solutions such as Xen, QEMU, or VMWare. These
virtualization platforms are being used in distributed and parallel
environments including high performance computing.
The use of virtual machines within such environments introduces new
challenges to system management. These include tedious tasks such as
deploying para-virtualized host operating systems to support virtual machine
execution or virtual overlay networks to connect these virtual machines.
Additionally, there is the problem of machine definition and deployment,
which is complicated by differentiation in the underlying virtualization
technology.
This paper discusses tools for the deployment and management of both host
operating systems and virtual machines in clusters. We begin with an
overview of system-level virtualization and move on to a description of
tools that we have developed to aid with these environments. These tools
extend prior work in the area of cluster installation, configuration and
management.
