The management of virtual machines running on large infrastructures is a challenge - monitoring/controlling the VMs’ configurations, locations, states, amount of resources used/available, list of responsible users (VMs’ owners), etc. becomes difficult once having just tens of VMs, and becomes harder and harder by the increasing number of them.

Even though many VMs’ managers already exist, they often suffer from a limited number of virtualization systems, which they are able to control, the availability to monitor/control the whole cluster of the hosts, which comprise the core of the infrastructure, worthless complexity or highly restricted set of features, restrictions in resource management/monitoring functionality, pricing policy, etc.

The goal of our work is to implement a novel VMs’ manager providing at least the following set of features:

• open-source implementation
• independence on the controlled virtualized systems (using libvirt library)
• all the basic operations (create, start, stop, migrate, destroy etc.) applicable on the individual VMs as well as sets of VMs
• possibility to control the whole cluster of the hosts comprising the infrastructure
• possibilities to open a VM console in order to overcome situations when the VM becomes unaccesible through the network
• possibility to define and manage users and users’ groups, allowing the infrastructure administrators to define various permissions to the VMs for the individual users/user groups
• well-arranged web-based user interface allowing the users to monitor/control various events (using AJAX technologies)
• an optional integration with a system for configuration management (Puppet)
• an optional integration with a system for resource usage monitoring
• etc.

Contacts:
Tomáš Rebok, xrebok@fi.muni.cz
Martin Jantošovič, jantosko@mail.muni.cz