FlexVAPs: um sistema de gerenciamento de virtual appliances para máquinas virtuais heterogêneas

Abstract

Virtual appliance is a new concept derived from the virtual machine monitors world. It is considered a data package that can be electronically distributed. Today, there area free and commercial virtual appliance repositories available on the market. These data packages are mostly composed by pre-configured and pre-optimized operating systems and applications joined to solve a specific computing problem. The growing virtual machine monitor market has lead to a wide virtual appliance variety available to end users. This diversity naturally results in heterogeneous virtual machines, ie, instances of virtual appliances that run on different virtual machine monitors. Thus, this work has as main goal propose and prototype a virtual appliance management solution for heterogeneous virtual machines, something less explored until now. The aim is to provide end users the ability of managing different environments, using virtual appliances, such as computer labs, clusters, networks and other kinds of computing environments. Virtual appliance creation and maintenance is more practical and effective for both system administrators and end users. Moreover, the sharing of different virtual appliances avoids the waste of time and disk space, as usually occurs with traditional approaches. In this work it is proposed, prototyped and evaluated a system for managing virtual appliances for heterogeneous virtual machines. This system has proved to be feasible for using VAP repositories to manage networked machines and systems, simplifying the work of end users and system administrators.