Towards Self-Assisted Troubleshooting for the Deployment of Private Clouds

Acquiring a private computing cloud is the first step that an enterprise would choose to enable the cloud model and get its considerable benefits while keeping the control within the enterprise. The enterprise level applications that provide the infrastructure enabling cloud computing services are typically built by integrating inter-related complex software components. Critical challenges of these applications are the increasing level of inter-component dependencies and the customized growth, which make recurrent deployment of such applications, as the one required in private clouds, labor intensive and error prone. In this paper we investigate the type of issues faced when deploying a cloud computing management infrastructure and propose a solution to self-assist the deployment. We show how by leveraging virtual image technologies we can detect faulty installations and their signatures early in the deployment process. We also propose a methodology to capture in a shared repository and update these signatures for reuse in subsequent deployments in the form of two level signature patterns. We explore the perspective of our solution and criteria of analysis.