The re-perimeterization and the erosion of trust boundaries already happening in organizations is amplified and accelerated by Cloud Computing. Cloud service models employed, operational models, and technologies used to enable Cloud services may present additional risks and requirements to an organization compared to traditional IT solutions. This paper focuses on Cloud security management issues and interoperability challenges for Collaborative Clouds. Based on a comprehensive requirements analysis, we intendified Cloud security management domains, integrating various Cloud security services of an organization and providing interoperability to identified stakeholders, in order to guideline Cloud activities within an organization. Furthermore we present the status quo of current approaches, systems and standards, with a special focus to objects within the Cloud Security Management Infrastructure (CSMI) that have to be managed and integrated by a Cloud security management system.
Cloud computing is a paradigm of virtualized distributed environments with virtual machines as their primary building blocks. Being a distributed system, Cloud computing paradigm needs a new layer of software to provide different aspects of distribution transparency at virtual machine level. This software layer called Cloud infrastructure is deployed above the virtual machine monitor layer. In this paper, we present some of the Cloud infrastructure technology challenges such as image management and scheduling in Cloud distributed environments. In addition, we argue how some prominent Cloud infrastructures such as Eucalyptus and OpenNebula tackle these challenges. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we show how the deployment of different transparent network services is possible using a specific Cloud infrastructure service through the mentioned technology.
Nowadays, new management paradigms are based on more and more autonomous and decentralized decision-making. Thus, an adaptive management of the volume and the quantity of information supplied by the monitorisng mechanisms is essential. This paper presents works in progress carried out to facilitate the automation of the monitoring processes adaptation. It focuses on a control-oriented characterization of polling mechanisms that leads to the specification of a set of parameters affecting the polling execution, and to a formal representation of the polling mechanism and of the monitoring adaptability. An “adaptable poller” module, based on a unified algorithm which is able to consider, initially and at run-time, the variations of the polling parameters, has been designed, developed and tested in a CIM/WBEM environment. This module offers a polling service that can be controlled by any business management component that would wish to act both on the quality of the information collected and on the performances of the polling mechanism itself.
In this paper we analyse the suitability of computing clouds, i.e. large-scale virtualized infrastructures for high-performance applications that are normally executed on specialised clusters or supercomputers. We classify such applications according to their requirements on different system components and present measurements of virtualization software overhead for these components. Based on the results, we discuss cloud-tolerant problems and address surprising performance effects observed in different hypervisors.
Large-scale virtualized infrastructures, such as those underlying cloud offerings, introduce novel, virtual variants of network components and links in addition to the well-known physical network elements. In these consolidated and generalised provisioning infrastructures, network QoS (quality of service) requirements apply not only to classic uplinks but also to storage and computing cluster interconnects: they determine the overall quality of the services provided. In this paper, we identify the components and connections forming end-to-end links, map them to managed components of the virtualized infrastructure and propose a strategy to realise generic end-to-end QoS coupling across arbitrary, combined virtual and physical network topologies.
Managing corporate Information Technology (IT) environment becomes increasingly complex as server logic architecture becomes distributed and the number of manageable entities increases. At the same time, the open source community has not yet produced a reliable systems and network management solution, even though there are open source initiatives specializing in individual fields of remote management. This paper presents OpenRSM, an integrated remote management system created by integrating individual open source initiatives and augmenting them to support additional functionality so that a lightweight integrated systems and network management solution is produced.
The use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has become more and more prevalent over the past few years. Many IaaS users face the challenge of managing different services and applications running on different IaaS providers. This requires them to interact with different APIs offered by the different providers, and increases the complexity of managing their services. In this paper, we address this problem by modeling IaaS using the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) meta-model. Based on this model, a generic IaaS proxy was developed using Web2Exchange to enable users to easily manage services provided by variant IaaS providers in a heterogeneous environment. As an initial case study we have prototyped the unified IaaS proxy with capability to support management of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
In this paper, we present a policy-based framework that supports automated dynamic resource management in a virtualized environment. This allows for flexibility in how resources are allocated. We show how this framework can be used to support memory management through the use of migration and making local resource adjustments.
Scalable and interoperable security management has become an important issue in advanced datacenter services. In our previous work, we had developed integrated access control manager (IAM) that manages accesses to various resources. To integrate access controls for various resources, a scalable and interoperable resource information service that provides target resource information to compose access control policies is required. To improve interoperability and performance of the resource information service, we brought a resource information cache into the IAM and introduced an automatic cache update control method that updates cached information proactively based on WS-Management and CIM standards. To reduce server loads to update cached information, the proposed method selects a part of cached information by content priority as an update target instead of updating all cached contents. We evaluated the average query response time of resource information service by simulating the proposed method. The proposed method reduced average query response time by 66.66% compared to the conventional reactive update control method.
Power is becoming a critical resource to large scale server systems and data centers. With active deployment of virtualization technology, power management raise more challenges and have negative impact on system performance due to : (1) the isolation between the guest Virtual Machines (VMs) and the Virtual Machines Manager (VMM), and (2)the independent operation between multiple VMs. In order to improve the conventional per-Operating System power management techniques and make it possible to control and globally coordinate the power management policies for virtualized resources among all VMs and the VMM, new features and sophisticated designs must be integrated into the VMM or Hypervisor. In this paper a review is presented on the power management challenges in virtualization environments and some proposed solutions are compared. This paper also presents some discussions on the research topics on power management in virtualization environments.
The quick adoption of virtualization technology in general and the advent of the Cloud business model entail new requirements on the structure and the configuration of back-end I/O systems. Several approaches to virtualization of I/O links are being introduced, which aim at implementing a more flexible I/O channel configuration without compromising performance. While previously the management of I/O devices could be limited to basic technical requirments (e.g. the establishment and termination of fixed-point links), the additional flexibility carries in its wake additional management requirements on the representation and control of I/O sub-systems. This paper focuses on the modelling of dynamic and static aspects of the management of virtual I/O devices. Based on management scenarios and common operations on virtual machines we propose management function prototoypes and discuss the corresponding necessary information items.
Considering trust and privacy requirements for online and collaborative distance learning environments, this paper discusses potential extensions of SOA based applications to simultaneously support authentication and authorization services, and offering mutual trust to both learners and service providers. This study shows that the security mechanisms integrated in the SOA platform can be effectively extended and correlated with a trust model.
Virtualization technology is offering new and unique ways to better manage systems and the application workloads they support. In fact, virtualization is moving beyond single systems to pools of systems that can be logically managed as a single system in the data center. Virtualization also introduces a paradigm shift in availability management which significantly simplifies the complexity involved in achieving resiliency. The focus of this paper is to describe an availability management architecture, and discuss capabilities that can be used to provide virtual machine resiliency in today’s virtualized data center. This paper addresses the detection and recovery of unplanned downtime resulting from system failures. In addition, we show that improved resiliency can be provided to virtual machines to minimize what has been traditional considered planned downtime.
Normally, virtualization technology is adopted to construct the infrastructure of cloud computing environment. Resources are managed and organized dynamically through virtual machine (VM) coalitions in accordance with the requirements of applications. Enforcing mandatory access control (MAC) on the VM coalitions will greatly improve the security of VM-based cloud computing. However, the existing MAC models lack the mechanism to confine the covert flows and are hard to eliminate the convert channels. In this paper, we propose a covert flows confinement mechanism for virtual machine coalitions (CFCC), which introduces dynamic conflicts of interest based on the activity history of VMs, each of which is attached with a label. The proposed mechanism can be used to confine the covert flows between VMs in different coalitions. We implement a prototype system, evaluate its performance, and show that our mechanism is practical.
Query basing on content and geographical scope can increase the MODIS 1B data retrieval efficiency significantly. This article explores how to achieve the content-based web query service. The roadmap includes preprocessing the data to generate additional and assistant information for content-based query, relational database designed for storing the information, the work flow of content-based web query, display of query results and data transfer. Relevant technical key points are also discussed in detail. This roadmap adapts to some utilization specificities of the remote sensing data, and it is a good base to estimate a content-based query of more universality.
Application of various different management interfaces and protocols leads to urgent requirements of management mediation that introduces management hierarchies, and mediation of management information is the basics for the study on management hierarchy. This paper focuses on examining information specification languages available in network management domain from the viewpoint of information granularity, analyzes the modeling aspects of these languages and discusses their articulation problem based on visualization by means of concept lattices benefited from Formal Concept Analysis. The examples provided in this paper explain how visualization plays a prominent role in studying management information specification languages and their articulation by alignment.
Virtual Machines have been commonly used for server consolidation in data centers, network classrooms, and cloud computing environments. Although booting up a virtual machine takes much less time than booting up a physical computer, booting up multiple virtual machines on a single physical server still takes a lot of time. We propose a method to speed up the booting process when a set of similar virtual machines share a snapshot enabled storage. Our method exploits massive memory page sharing stemming from the reads to common disk blocks by these virtual machines. Our experiments show that the second virtual machine may reduce the booting time by half.
Virtualization is achieving increasing popularity and there are some mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms available which control overt communications among virtual machines (VM) in virtual machine systems. However such mechanisms cannot block covert channels. A strong isolation mechanism at hardware layer can benefit solutions to this problem. Hence, in this paper we propose an isolation mechanism based on Chinese Wall policy to make an air-gap among VMs which have conflict of interest, and implement it on a popular virtual machine monitor (VMM), Xen. It regulates the VMM allocating hardware resources like physical memory, CPUs and I/O adapters to VMs without many losses of system performance. Hence it provides stronger isolation among VMs than VMMs do.
Virtualization for the x86 platform has imposed itself recently as a new technology that can improve the usage of machines in data centers and decrease the cost and energy of running a high number of servers. Similar to virtualization, autonomic computing and more specifically self-optimization, aims to improve server farm usage through provisioning and deprovisioning of instances as needed by the system. Autonomic systems are able to determine the optimal number of server machines - real or virtual - to use at a given time, and add or remove servers from a cluster in order to achieve optimal usage. While provisioning and deprovisioning of servers is very important, the way the autonomic system is built is also very important, as a robust and open framework is needed. One such management framework is the Web Service Distributed Management (WSDM) system, which is an open standard of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). This paper presents an open framework built on top of the WSDM specification, which aims to provide self-optimization for applications servers residing on virtual machines.
Traditional virtual scenario management tools (VNUML, NetKit, MLN, etc.) normally consider mono-host deployment (i.e. the entire virtualized scenario deployed in the same physical host). In this paper, the work carried out in the EDIV project, dealing with the development of a multi-host evolution of the Virtual Network User Mode Linux (VNUML) tool, is presented. Following an overview of virtual scenario-based management, the distributed deployment management architecture, detailing the main components, its interfaces and operations, is described. Additionally, details on the actual implementation and the results achieved so far are provided, assessing the feasibility and advantages of the system. Finally a proposal to evolve the tool towards DMTF virtualization related standards (CIM-based virtualization management and OVF) is outlined.
