Virtual Applications
3.3.2 Virtual Applications
Information-based processes in conventional IT are realized by various applications involving interactions among collections of resources. The resources supporting a given application may run in a single data center or across multiple data centers depending on application requirements.
Continuing the analogy with conventional IT, one may expect that virtual appli- cations – the second key enabling technology – will be the basic, high-level unit of resource deployment:
Virtual application . A collection of interconnected virtual resources deployed in one or more virtual data centers that implement a particular IT service.
A virtual application consists not only of the virtual machines that implement the application’s software functionality, but also of the other virtual resources needed to realize the application such as virtual networks and virtual storage. In this sense, a virtual application extends the concept of a virtual appliance (Sapuntzakis & Lam, 2003 ), which includes the complete software stack (virtual machines and operating system, with network interfaces) implementing a single service, to encompass the set of services supporting the application.
Just as a VDC can show a data center in a more ideal form, a virtual application can present the appearance of an application as it ideally should be. Today, security, resource management, and information management are typically enforced by the operating system and application stack, which makes them complex and expensive to implement and maintain. With the simplified, unified management provided by the virtual application abstraction and encapsulation of application components in
3 Key Enabling Technologies for Virtual Private Clouds 55 point for consistent application management. Instead of orchestrating each resource
individually, an organization can operate on the full set in concert, achieving the equivalent of “one click” provisioning, power on, snapshot, backup, and so on.
The primary VPC implementation profile may be now refined again as one in which virtual applications consisting of virtual resources run across one or more VDCs (see Fig. 3.2 ) (Note 1).
Fig. 3.2 Virtual applications run across one or more
Virtual Private Cloud
private virtual data centers VPN VDC 4 (VDCs), connected by virtual
VDC 1 VPN
VDC
VDC private networks (VPNs) vApp 2 VPN 3 3
vApp 1
vApp 2
The Open Virtualization Format (OVF, 2009 ) recently standardized by the Data Management Task Force offers a convenient way to specify collections of virtual machines. Through metadata, the interconnections between those machines and their dependencies on other resources such as networks and storage may also be expressed, supporting full virtual applications as defined here. In addition to sev- eral commercial products, the specification is also supported in the Open-OVF open source project ( open-ovf.sourceforge.net ).
An organization using a VPC with the first two enabling technologies now intro- duced will be able to use its private VDCs to deploy virtual applications. The next enabling technologies address the contract between those applications and the VPC that enables the automatic assembly of components to meet organizational IT objectives while maintaining flexibility for optimization.
Note
1. The interplay between VDCs and virtual applications is an important aspect of meeting organizational IT requirements with a VPC, which do depend in some
cases on (possibly relative) location, as noted in Section 3.3.1 . Thus, in addition to the primary role of virtual applications in enabling portability between clouds, virtual applications may also be viewed as a way to enable effective deployment within a cloud by describing the desired relationships among virtual resources.
Parts
» Cloud Computing Model Application Methodology
» Cloud Computing in Development/Test
» Cloud-Based High Performance Computing Clusters
» Case Study: Cloud as Infrastructure for an Internet Data Center (IDC)
» Case Study – Cloud Computing for Software Parks
» Case Study – an Enterprise with Multiple Data Centers
» Service-Management Integration
» Cloud Deployment Models and the Network
» Latency, Bandwidth, and Scale – The Span
» Security, Resiliency, and Service Management – The Superstructure
» Network Architecture for Hybrid Cloud Deployments
» Characteristics of Data-Intensive Computing Systems
» Related Work on DS Scheduling
» Scheduling Issues Inside Service Oriented Environments
» Scheduling Through Negotiation
» Prototype Implementation Details
» Basics of Grid and Cloud Computing
» Service Orientation and Web Services
» Scheduling, Metascheduling, and Resource Provisioning
» Interoperability in Grids and Clouds
» Security and User Management
» Modeling and Simulation of Clouds and Grids
» Enterprise Knowledge Cloud Technologies
» NC State University Cloud Computing Implementation
» Computational/Data Node Network
» Integrating High-Performance Computing into the VCL
» Large Scale Workflow Applications
» Overview of SwinDeW-G Environment
» SwinDeW-C System Architecture
» History on Enterprise IT Services
» Remote Sensing Geo-Reprojection
» Singular Value Decomposition
» System Model for Auction in CACM
» Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm
» Anagram Based GrADS Data Distribution Service
» Hyrax Based Five Dimension Distribution Data Service
» Design and Implementation of an Instrument Service for NetCDF Data Acquisition
» A Weather Forecast Quality Evaluation Scenario
» Implementation of the Grid Application
» Overview of Amazon EC2 Setup
» DGEMM Single Node Evaluation
» Data Clouds: Emerging Technologies
» Cloud Architecture as Foundation of Cloud-Based Scientific Applications
» Emergence of Cloud-Based Scientific Computational
» Setup and Experiment on Tiny Cloud Infrastructure
» On Economical Use of the Enterprise Cloud
» Toward Integration Of Private and Public Enterprise Cloud Environment
» Brief Discussion of Medical Standards
» Objective 1: A Service Oriented Architecture for Interfacing Medical Messages
» Objective 4: A Globally Distributed Dynamically Scalable Cloud Based Application Architecture
» Distributing Multidimensional Environmental Data
» Enabling the NetCDF Java Interface to S3
» The NetCDF Service Architecture
» NetCDF Service Deployment Scenarios
» Evaluation of S3- and EBS-Enabled NetCDF Java Interfaces
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