Xen-OSCAR for Cluster Virtualization

New virtualization solutions such as Xen allow users to execute hundreds of virtual machines on a single physical machine. The interest of these solutions have been proven for system isolation and security features, especially for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as well as for high performance computing. A natural question is to know if it is possible to use all these virtual machines at the same time, creating a virtual cluster. This might be an interesting solution for the development and the experimentation of cluster applications. This document presents an extension of OSCAR for the deployment and the management of Xen virtual machines. We also analyze in this paper the interest of virtualization for the development, the testing and the experimentation of applications for clusters, in particular with the use of a fully virtualized cluster.