[libvirt] Announcement of a companion project the "UnifiedSessionsManager"

[acue]

Hello,
I would like to announce the unifiedSessionsManager(GPL3, including the 
claimed inventions), which is based
for Xen on the virsh-tool, but basically uses a different approach. I 
guess it could be a quite usable companion
of libvirt for advanced usage and enhanced customizabelity of the 
handling of huge amounts of virtual and
physical machines in a distributed environment. It is targeting on test, 
development and productive
environments.

This requirement will particularly arise, when "bulk-core-CPUs" enter 
the market, providing for independently
executed bulks of virtual machines, which may be logically designed as 
stacked and nested VMs, founding a
tree like multi-layered structure of VM clusters.

The design-preview as estimated by the unifiedSessionsManager is here 
the v-component, what could be seen as
the extensin of the slogan/concept of a so called virtual appliance, 
where a full scale VM including it's inherent
GuestOS is handeled as a virtual software component. V-Compoents are 
foreseen to be grouped into clusters of
VMs, arranged within a nested VMSTACK and managed - e.g. suspended -  as 
a group of services, founding a
combined service by their self.

In case this preview becomes reality, this may have an impact on the 
basic design, particularly the interface
design of each of it's components to be stack-aware, thus for libvirt 
too. For example providing the shutdown
of a stack of VMs, including the suspension of machines containing upper 
VMs,  might require some kind of
communications and propagation..

The usage of multilayered VMSTACKs is already supported by the 
unifiedSessionsManager. Particularly
MACRO and GROUP features support for handling of the number of entities 
required to be handled for a
VMSTACK. Whereas much of the required functionality from the VMs is 
simulated, particularly by
utilizing a recursive Stack-Propagation based on native access to 
GuestOSs with SSO-accounts.

The concrete supported products of current version 01_07_001b02 are:
 - GuestOS and HostOS on physical machines: CentOS, Fedora, debian, 
OpenSUSE, Ubuntu,
   OpenBSD, Solaris10(limited)
 - Hypervisors/Emulators: QEMU, Xn, VMware(workstation,server,player)

Future Plans are, mostly for the next version already:
 -Planned-OS: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris10(complete), OpenSolaris, 
ScientificLinux
 -Planned-OS: eCos(?), uCLinux(several ARCH), SkyEye, ...
 -Planned-VM: VirtualBOX(evaluation first), OpenVZ(evaluation first)

 .Introduction of a LDAP based nameservice for VMs.

 -Evaluation of:Cygwin

The Idea was the easy to adapt utilization of a 
minimalistic-bash-scripts only implementation for setting
up a unified wrapper interface customizable for almost any kind of user 
sessions by almost anyone. Even
 though I would prefer now at least Perl or for specific parts full 
scale C/C++ code and Java/JavaScript
for some administrative parts.

The managed user environment comprises sessions to VMs which could be 
allocated in a nested multilayered
VMSTACK as well as within a PM, which are physical machines - layer-0 
entities. Also HOSTs sessions as
native access to GuestOSs are integrated.

Additionally a simple implemented but with sophisticated functionally 
equipped cache database is introduced
in order to support for hundreds and thousands of virtual machines to be 
managed, with an average
query-response-time for single-level-filters of less than 1second. 
Results are measured with an average of
0.3-0.8seconds in the ref.-env., even though bash and awk is mainly used 
only with an Office-Compatible
record format.

Information could be found within the User-Manual, which has more than 
600pages, and within the sources
of more than 110.000LinesOfCode.

The following sites provide downloads:

http://www.heise.de/software/download/unified_sessions_manager_ctys/51630
http://www.unifiedsessionsmanager.org
http://www.unifiedsessionsmanager.eu
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctys (sourceforge not yet complete)
(berlios follows)


There are basically three reasons for sending this Mail:

1. Announcing a new supplemental project focusing on usage of 
distributed and stacked VMs
2. Getting some feedback and ideas for the future direction of the 
development of libvirt and the
    unifiedSessionsManager.
3. Probably initiation of setting up a common overall concept for the 
future vision of an IT environment
    and it's integrated handling of VMs.

And of course, I would appreciate, if the current version already is of 
some benefit for the OpenSource
community.

Yours Sincerely
Arno-Can Uestuensoez

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                   Arno-Can Uestuensoez

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