Virtual Machines in Grid Environments: Dynamic Virtual Machines - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 417

applying VM technology to grids requires addressing the issues of mobil-
ity and complexity management. We have introduced the DVM concept
and system for grids. The DVM system can generate a virtual environment
swiftly and dynamically “on-demand.” It provides dynamic virtual envi-
ronments to support a wide spectrum of applications in a distributed,
shared, heterogeneous, and homogeneous environment. Experimental
results show that the DVM approach is feasible, efi cient, and signii cantly
better than existing methods in virtual machine deployment and virtual
machine migration.
Current virtual machine technology lacks the standard and functionality
to support customization l exibility. We have introduced the DVM middle-
ware framework to support the customization l exibility and implemented
it to demonstrate its correctness and effectiveness. The DVM approach
can provide great support for a better standardization, a well-structured
representation, and a customizable and l exible virtual resources manage-
ment. While computing becomes more and more service-based, system-
level virtualization becomes more and more a necessity to provide system
virtualization, customization, and security.
The dynamic virtual machine or dynamic virtual space concept is not
limited to grids. It can extend to any general distributed environments.
For instance, it can be directly applied to support customization of a single
virtual machine on sequential and parallel computers and virtual machine
migration will provide an extra level of security and virtualization of
mobile computing. This chapter introduced only the fundamental DVM
and system-level virtualization but has revealed the need and potential of
a DVM. A DVM has not been fully integrated into grid environments at
this time and much work remain to be done.
References
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2. VMware Co. Available at: http://www.vmware.com.
3. P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer,
I. Pratt, and A. Wari eld, “Xen and the art of virtualization,” in Proceedings of
the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) , pp. 164-177,
New York, 2003.
4. J. Smith and R. Nair, Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and
Processes , Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.
5. K. Keahey, M. Ripeanu, and K. Doering. “Dynamic creation and manage-
ment of runtime environments in the Grid,” presented at the Workshop on
Designing and Building Web Services (GGF 9), Chicago, October, 2003.
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services,” ACM queue July/August 2005.