VNIX: Managing Virtual Machines on Clusters

With the development of virtualization technology, it¿s desirable to deploy virtual machines to high performance clusters used for data centers. VNIX, developed in Services Computing Technology and System lab, tries to help cluster administrators to manage a large number of virtual machines (VMs) distributed on clusters. To reduce the complexity of virtualization management, VNIX provides a whole-set of tools for monitoring, deploying, controlling, and configuring virtual machines on clusters. In addition to those basic management functions, VNIX also offers a number of specialized tools for clustering VMs. Due to the complex dynamic environment in clusters, it¿s challenging to design such tools. In this paper, we present the design of VNIX, and we describe several use cases of managing VMs in clusters with VNIX. Such use cases illustrate various ways of using VNIX to simplify the management work and to improve resource utilization.