Virtualization and Grid Computing

[ANNOUNCE] Xen 3.2.0 released!

(happy new year — I am still recovering)

This Better Know a VM entry, Virtual Cluster Appliances, gives an overview of VM contextualization technology which is scheduled to be part of the next workspace service release. This is not just relevant to classic grid computing, but any situation where you’d like to automatically launch many virtual machines that work together and want them to securely organize themselves and adapt to the deployment environment. It can even be used for one VM, we’ll look at such cases later.

Kate will give a talk today: 10:30-11:00am at the AIST booth. Go check it out!

(In the future, you should be able to find the slides here).

Kate Keahey writes:

On behalf of the workspace team, I am happy to announce the TP 1.3 release of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from:http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

This release adds significant new features. First, the workspace service can now start multiple VM instances grafted off of the same VM image in one request; the VM instances can be managed as a group or individually. Second, we added accounting functionality and services allowing users to query accounting information. Last but not least, we added configuration enhancements to make service administration easier, as well as numerous functionality and usability enhancements for the client.

These new features and enhancements necessitated some WSDL changes as well as an addition of a new namespace. The current release has a technology preview status: both interfaces and implementation are likely to change to some extent.

This new 1.3 release provides a baseline for a cycle of releases that aim to break up the service into several replacable components that could be easily and/or independently used. In particular, the next releases will include the following functionality:

• the contextualization service allowing VMs to be adapted at deployment time to the context of a site, an organization, or other VMs
• the workspace pilot which can be used in conjunction with existing batch schedulers (such as e.g. PBS) to run VMs as well as normal jobs on the same cluster

These technologies are currently undergoing alpha testing by selected friendly communities. If you are interested in testing, and don’t mind a little bit of adventure, give us a call.

We welcome comments, feedback, and bug reports. Information about the project, software downloads, documentation and instructions on how to join the workspace-user mailing list for support questions can be found
at: http://workspace.globus.org/

Groups:

(click on the picture to read more)

Regarding the last entry, Workspace Service TP1.3, release candidate 1, the user and administrator documentation is now ready to go.

Mail sent to workspace-dev earlier:

We are busy preparing TP1.3 documentation and have put release candidate #1 online in the meantime. You can download RC1 here:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html

Currently the changelog, new interface description pages, and plugin description page are prepared (still considered drafts though). However, the new user and administrator guides are not online yet, see the RC1 notes at the link above.

We are only recommending past workspace service installers try out the release candidate.

The changelog contains a summary section at its beginnng, see:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html#changelog

Some of the additions: group deployments, usage tracking modules, configuration changes to make administration easier, client enhancements, and documentation enhancements.