Self-Managing Distributed Virtual Environments

Research Areas: Network Security,

Principal Investigator: Dongyan Xu

This collaborative SGER proposal investigates management and autonomic operational issues in running distributed virtual private environments. The proposal calls this environment a “VP-Grid”; organic in function, a VP-Grid acts as an overlay on top of existing grid resources and dynamically adjusts at run-time in response to resource and network conditions in emulating a virtual grid environment. The SGER proposal introduces management mechanisms to support functions associated with creation and operation of a VP-Grid. This “self-management” environment will then be evaluated using an emulation program for dynamic worm infection.

Specifically, the research tasks are outlined to include: explore application-specific administration policy specification and enforcement through instantiation of self-management agents within the virtual VP-Grid and outside (i.e. on the underlying Grid resources); investigate effectiveness of orchestration methods (scaling, re-location and topology adjustment) by application-driven conditions and demands; and perform a system emulation based on a real Internet worm code.

Keywords: virtual environment, VPN