STORM: Simple Tool for Resource Management

摘要

Virtualization has recently become very popular in the area of system engineering and administration. This is primarily due to its benefits, such as: longer uptimes, better hardware utilization, and greater reliability. These benefits can reduce physical infrastructure, space, power consumption, and management costs. However, managing a virtualized environment to gain those benefits is difficult and rife with details.rnThrough the use of a concept known as virtual appliances, the benefits of virtualization can be brought to organizations without sufficient knowledge or staff to install and support a complex virtual infrastructure. This same concept can also be used to provide cheap datacenter services to larger companies, or research facilities that are unable or unwilling to run a high performance computing environment.rnIn this paper, we describe Storm, a system designed to simplify the development, deployment and provisioning for common applications. The system is designed to be easy to configure and maintain. It can automatically react to changes in system load to deploy additional services and it dynamically powers client machines using IMPI controls to enhance energy savings. We demonstrate the utility of the system using scalable mail appliance.