System management software for virtual environments

Recently there has been an increased interest in the use of system-level virtualization using mature solutions such as Xen, QEMU, or VMWare. These virtualization platforms are being used in distributed and parallelenvironments including high performance computing. The use of virtual machines within such environments introduces newchallenges to system management. These include tedious tasks such as deploying para-virtualized host operating systems to support virtual machine execution or virtual overlay networks to connect these virtual machines. Additionally, there is the problem of machine definition and deployment,which is complicated by differentiation in the underlying virtualizationtechnology. This paper discusses tools for the deployment and management of both hostoperating systems and virtual machines in clusters. We begin with an overview of system-level virtualization and move on to a description of tools that we have developed to aid with these environments. These tools extend prior work in the area of cluster installation, configuration and management.