Deployment of grids through integrated configuration management

A Grid environment typically comes into existence when several collaborating institutions contribute resources for researchers to solve problems of mutual interest. Such collaboration of personnel and resources are commonly referred to as a Virtual Organization (VO). The process to establish and manage a VO can be a time consuming and laborious process with installation and configuration of VO specific software and data needed across sites. Configuration management technologies can facilitate this process, however to support the establishment of Grid based VOs, it is necessary to align and integrate Grids and configuration management technologies. This alignment should recognize that sites may have their own flavors of configuration management tools and Grid technologies, and allow VO administrators to seamlessly deploy and configure Grid resources across multiple sites. This paper presents the experiences in developing and testing such an integrated Grid and configuration management framework