Virtualization activities in the Grid Deployment Group

Setup of a virtualization infrastructre

Within EGEE's SA3 activity a team at CERN is doing certification and testing of the gLite middleware. The usage of virtual machines significantly speeds up this process. To see the status of the project in Jan 2007 have a look at this presentation. This project uses several tools to set up a Xen based virtualization infrastructure:

• We take Xen rpms provided by CERN Linux support. These rpms allow us to easily integrate with the CERN SLC4 based Linux environment. In particular we have AFS enabled guest images. Together with FIO we defined a Xen host quattor profile that allows us to easily add Xen hosts to our pool of machines. For more information look at the Linux support Xen TWiki.
• To manage the deployment of virtual machines a web based tool is being developed: vnode.
• To generate SLC3/4 and other Linux flavors images ready for use with Xen scripts (libfsimage) were developed that allow to create such images easily. The scripts can be used as is or via a web interface called osfarm developed at CERN openlab.

Xen Quickstart Guide

-- AndreasUnterkircher - 27 Mar 2008