GridBuilder: A Tool for Creating Virtual Grid Testbeds
Stephen Childs, Brian A. Coghlan, Jason McCandless · Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) · 2006
Grid software developers and Grid site administrators both require realistic testbeds where they can test appli-cations and middleware before deployment on production infrastructure. Such testbeds should be dynamically recon-figurable to allow replication of real-world configurations. While the combination of service nodes needed for a par-ticular application may vary greatly, there is a fixed set of node types which are used frequently: these are the building blocks needed to construct testbeds. We present GridBuilder: a web-based virtual machine (VM) manager that supports the rapid creation and cus-tomisation of Grid nodes based on standard configurations. GridBuilder allows users to create a library of filesystem images and then generate independent filesystems based on these images. Copy-on-write is used for fast initialisation and efficient use of disk space. GridBuilder uses standard Grid configuration tools to automatically configure the mid-dleware on new Grid service nodes. Users can save and re-store snapshots of nodes and can import images to create new node types. 1