VMPlants: Providing and Managing Virtual Machine Execution Environments for Grid Computing

Virtual machines provide flexible, powerful execution environments for Grid computing, offering isolation and security mechanisms complementary to operating systems, customization and encapsulation of entire application environments, and support for legacy applications. This paper describes a Grid service - VMPlant - that provides for automated configuration and creation of flexible VMs that, once configured to meet application needs, can then subsequently be copied ("cloned") and dynamically instantiated to provide homogeneous execution environments across distributed Grid resources. In combination with complementary middleware for user, data and resource management, the functionality enabled by VMPlant allows for problem-solving environments to deliver Grid applications to users with unprecedented flexibility. VMPlant supports a graph-based model for the definition of customized VM configuration actions; partial graph matching, VM state storage and "cloning" for efficient creation. This paper presents the VMPlant architecture, describes a prototype implementation of the service, and presents an analysis of its performance.