Virtual Machine Management Based on Agent Service

With the popularity of virtualization, the problem that how to manage hundreds even thousands of virtual machines running on multiple physical computing nodes becomes important. Current virtual machine management systems only can obtain basic information of virtual machines and execute simple operations on them, such as start, reboot and shutdown. In this paper, we design a virtual machine management approach based on agent service. Agent service can provide detail running status information inside virtual machines. It also has been a bridge for host machines and virtual machines to interact with each other. Agent service is designed to automatically start when virtual machine boots up. By agent service we can get real-time information about virtual machines. We evaluate monitoring overhead and the performance of batch operations when using agent. The experimental results show that agent mechanism outperforms methods using Libvirt or VMware tools.