Dissertaç ˜ao de Mestrado Mestrado em Engenharia Informática Jo ...

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1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Motivation sible to gather several underutilized servers into fewer ones (possibly just a single server) by virtualizing the hardware where each server runs. This reduces not only the companies’ electri- cal bills, but also cooling, space and hardware costs. Virtualization brings along other benefits such as the fast replication and/or migration of virtual machines (VMs), which allows for high availability of the services provided by the VMs. But not only the final users of virtualization woke up to the trend. Some IT giants such as Intel, AMD and Microsoft already entered the virtualization market, with different solutions such as hardware-assisted virtualization or hypervisor based virtualization. This huge trend also got into the consumers market, with popular solutions such as VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC, and even in the gaming market. Anyone who runs games on MAME or WINE is using virtualization technology. Currently, there are a lot of virtualization solutions in the market. These include VMware [VMw09], XenSource [Cit09], Microsoft [Mic09a], Sun [Mic09c], Parallels [Par09] products, and so on. With the advancement of virtualization technology, the new Virtual Appliance (VA) concept emerged. VAs came to change the way of looking to software deployment. Unlike the existing software deployment models, presented ahead in Section 2.1, such as the traditional CD-ROM way, Software as a Service or Hardware Appliances, VAs allow the costumers to have their own IT platform, fully optimized for the task being and completely under their domain. The blending of virtualization benefits with VAs’ performance is bringing software deployment to a new level. This shift in the IT sector motivated project VIRTU [Sol09a] which is a collective effort by the consortium composed of Evolve Space Solutions, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Universi- dade de Coimbra, HP Labs and the European Space Agency. The project’s goal is to develop an open-source vendor-independent virtualization platform, including support for the management and configuration of applications. There are currently two emerging opportunities on the IT market. On one side, virtualization has changed the way in which companies deploy software, on the other hand, application configuration is still mostly a manual task. VIRTU exploits these opportunities by defining a virtualization tool which manages application stacks. In other words, VIRTU allows for the creation of optimized virtual machines assembled with existing applications which can be au- tomatically configured. VIRTU project’s use cases range from software testing in complex distributed systems, including the European Space Operations Center’s Mission Control System (MCS) and Ground System Tests and Validation infrastructure (GSTVi), to IT infrastructural management, like Por- tugal Telecom’s Application Service Provider or Novabase’s Enterprise Applications Environ- ment. VIRTU also makes it possible for a customer to have its solution self-provisioned within his domain, but also to maintain different application versions to achieve legacy compatibility. The advent of virtual appliances makes it possible to gather hundreds, or thousands of applications on the same machine. This results in many different ways to represent configurations, which, in turn, makes the management of those configurations complicated and time- consuming. 2
1. INTRODUCTION 1.2. Problem Description This dissertation proposes the creation of a tool, entitled Smart Application Reconfiguration Tool (SmART), that is able to configure any application, regardless of how it represents its configuration. This tool was developed on the context of VIRTU project, which is a virtualization platform for the creation and management of VAs. 1.2 Problem Description The problem of automatic application configuration is caused by software applications which employ different means of representing their configurations. In some cases, it was noticed that the same application implemented different configuration formats from one version to another. This lack of standardization reveals that the configuration aspects of the applications are put in the backburner by application developers. Currently, the solutions on the field of automatic configuration of applications are seldom. This work goes in a way as to explore the mentioned opportunity. VAs may have different formats and may contain all sorts of applications, so it would be very helpful if a tool could configure any kind of application inside a VA. For this matter, it is essential that the tool interprets each configuration file independently of the application being configured, rather than having a limited set of known configurations and trying to match them with the configuration file. Besides the differences in the representation of configurations between two disparate applications, once can also identify divergent configurations in the same applications. Typically, whenever an application is upgraded, so are its configuration files, even if the differences in both situations come down to one or two extra lines containing new parametrizable elements than before. This motivates the abstraction from the configuration representation, which will allow any application to be configured based on what settings it defines, not how they are defined. Two ways to configure applications in VAs can be identified. The first sets up the configuration files before the application is installed on the VA, whereas the second searches for the configuration files in the VA and changes them. Given the fact that the we are dealing with text configuration files which need to be read and parsed in both approaches, applications whose configuration files are in the binary format may require special parsers. This is often the case in closed-source applications. An example of the typical usage of this tool is the case where many VAs containing the same applications (e.g., webserver) need to be deployed on an intranet. Although these VAs have the same software, their configurations must be different (e.g., machine name, IP address, etc.). Following is a brief description of both approaches and the way in which each approach deals with the example case. 3
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Bibliography [Ama09] Amazon. Amazon
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [Sol09a] Evolve Space
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Dissertaç ˜ao de Mestrado Mestrado em Engenharia Informática Jo ...

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