Supporting Virtualisation Management through an Object Mapping Declarative Language Framework

Abstract

Due to the inevitably vast scale of virtualised cloud computing systems, management of the numerous physical and virtual components that make up their underlying infrastructure may become unwieldy. Many software packages that have historically been installed on desktops / workstations for years are slowly but surely being ported to cloud computing. The virtualisation management problems that are apparent today are only set to worsen as cloud computing systems become ever more pervasive. Backing cloud computing systems are equally elaborate database systems, many platforms of which have made extensive use of distributed computing and virtualisation for years. The more recent emergence of virtualised big data systems with similarly vast scale problems has escalated the urgent requirement for creative management of the numerous physical and virtual components. The thesis will initially synopsise previous investigatory research concerning these emerging problems and studies the current disposition of virtualisation management including the associated concepts, strategies and technologies. The thesis then continues, to describe the structure and operation of an object mapping declarative language to support the management of these numerous physical and virtual components. The ultimate aim is to develop a Virtualisation Management System (VMS), a software framework that is fully extensible in nature and which combines the rich capability of an imperative assembly with the concise simplicity of a declarative language. It is through this declarative language that human interaction and decision making may be richly yet concisely specified before being converted through object mapping to the comparable imperative assembly for execution. It is also through parsing this declarative language that autonomic algorithms may be able to integrate with and operate the VMS through a suitably defined plug-in based mechanism. The thesis will ultimately demonstrate via scenarios both basic and complex that the VMS is able to specify, observe, regulate and adapt its virtualisation management domain to the changing disposition of the numerous physical and virtual components that constitute cloud computing and big data systems.