FlexVAPs: a system for managing virtual appliances in heterogeneous virtualized environments

Virtual appliances have emerged as an important concept in systems virtualization. They are conceived as data packages that can be electronically delivered and easily shared and distributed. A virtual appliance usually contains at least an operating system, libraries and tools targeted to provide a specific service on top of a virtual machine monitor. As virtualization technologies are rapidly evolving, there are many virtual machine monitors in the market and it is increasingly usual to have multiple, different monitors coexisting in the same software infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a software system for managing virtual appliances in such kind of heterogeneous virtualized infrastructure. This system, named FlexVAPs, provide the users with a flexible and adaptable virtual appliance management system, allowing to instantiate virtual machines over different types of virtual machine monitors. To validate our ideas, we designed and prototyped a system architecture based on weakly coupled and specialized components. This allows us to extend and use the system in different computing environments, easily meeting users particular requirements. At the end of this paper, we establish a comparison among FlexVAPs and two major solutions targeted to virtual appliance management, so as to highlight their benefits and drawbacks.