Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the VO formation phase, the originating partner sends out invitations to the
relevant business partners it wishes to invite. An invitation contains the high-level
contract or agreement that governs the new collaboration as well as any other low-
level policies and rules the originating partner may wish other partners to enforce
such as global access control policies. At this point invited partners may accept
(or not, as they wish). In a typical online gaming collaboration, the originator
may invite hosting environments, game title providers, user base providers, web
portals, identity management providers, SLA monitoring providers, and so on. In
the online gaming scenario, Andago invites Sunny and Saygah to take part in a
gaming collaboration where Sunny and Saygah will be responsible for hosting and
executing game instances. Andago also invites ARPEGGIO, BEMOL, and CHOIR
to take part in the collaboration as IT solutions providers. BEMOL and CHOIR, for
instance, provide security solutions as VAS in the collaboration.
The third phase deals with the operation of the VO. During this phase, new busi-
ness services previously selected in the VO formation phase can now be instanti-
ated, configured, contextualized, and exposed through the B2B service gateways
to the consumers inside the collaboration. The required supporting infrastructure
(the VAS) may also be instantiated, configured, and exposed to the collaboration.
Instantiation of a business service involves creating an altogether new segregated
instance of the service for a particular customer (be it a single user or an organi-
sation), configuring the logical host on which to run the instance (CPU, memory,
storage rules and restrictions), configuring the supporting VAS (security, QoS,
SLA), exposing the instance to the collaboration, and updating the service instance
registries maintained by the VOMS. This step of instantiation, configuration, and
contextualization is often called virtualization hence the name Virtual Hosting
Environment.
The final phase, VO dissolution, focuses on the removal of the collaboration,
the destruction of all created service instances (business and VAS), the removal of
configuration files and the reversion to the previous known stable state. In particular,
VO dissolution must ensure all systems involved remain in a coherent state and that
the registries correctly reflect the business state.
The following figure summarizes the VO lifecycle.
