Applying virtualization and system management in a cluster to implement an automated emulation testbed for grid applications

Although grid systems have evolved in such a way that they are largely used both in industry and academy, tech-niques to test and evaluate them, such as simulation and emulation, have limitations on both their applicability and their reliability. We are investigating the utilization of par-avirtualization techniques merged with systems manage-ment tools to build an automated emulation framework for grid experiments. This framework accesses standard net-work resources to manage communication among virtual nodes, allowing virtual machines to behave like a real grid environment. The development of this framework involves the mapping of virtual machines to physical hosts, auto-matic deployment and management of virtual machines, au-tomatic configuration of virtual network and experiment control. In this paper, we address these issues and present results demonstrating the feasibility and advantages of our approach. 1