Building an automated and self‐configurable emulation testbed for grid applications

Distributed systems, such as grids, are composed of geographically distributed computing elements that belong to multiple administrative domains and are controlled by multiple entities. It is unlikely that testers are able to acquire repeatedly the same resources, for the same amount of time, and under the same network conditions, which are paramount requirements for enabling reproducible and controlled tests in software under development. An alternative to experiments in real testbeds is the use of emulation tools, which allow the software to run in an environment that behaves like a distributed system. Although advances in virtualization technology allowed the development of efficient emulators, few efforts were put in making operation of such emulators easier. This paper presents the design and the development of the Automated Emulation Framework that allows automatic mapping of virtual machines to hosts, virtual machine deployment, network configuration, and proactive management and reconfiguration of the virtual infrastructure. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.