Message-ID: <48A0B705.2010809@i4p.de>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:02:45 +0200
From: acue <acue@i4p.de>
User-Agent: Mail/News  (X11/20061101)
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To: libvir-list@redhat.com
Subject: Announcement of a companion project the "UnifiedSessionsManager"
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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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