UT Institute of Computer Science Graduation Theses Registry

Name

Andres Traks

Abstract

IT-infrastructure is comprised of the resources of an IT-system: physical and virtual machines (VMs), network connections, software, processors, memory, storage space and network interfaces. In order to manage IT-infrastructure, special software is needed to monitor and perform actions on these resources. Actions related to resources are, for example, allocating storage, starting and stopping VMs, migrating VMs, etc. It is also important to be able to do management tasks from one remote computer. A typical scenario is a private cloud dedicated to running simulations for scientific research where many computers in a network need to be managed. This thesis looks at how to create an intuitive and efficient graphical user interface (GUI) for this type of software. Some features that system administrators typically use from the command line may not be worth implementing in the GUI. Studies have shown that system administrators tend to consider the GUI as less reliable and less efficient, but still better for the visualization of infrastructure. For example, used disk space can be represented as a graphical bar instead of text for better comprehensibility. A part of the thesis analyses existing management software: VMware, Citrix, Cloudkick and OpenNode. One of the supervisors, Ilja Livenson, is a developer of OpenNode. In addition to functional requirements, the software should meet requirements for security, scalability, fault tolerance and standards compliance. The standards should preferably be open and commonly used. Also, the solutions should work on mobile devices. The practical part of the thesis is done for the open-source server virtualization project called OpenNode. OpenNode consists of a central management server and a frontend for it called OpenNode Management Console (ONC). The frontend has so far lacked a flexible infrastucture visualization component. As part of the thesis, a component called VM-map is implemented, which is used to view physical machines and the VMs within them, to see information about them and to perform actions such as VM resizing and migration.

Graduation Thesis language

English

Graduation Thesis type

Bachelor - Information Technology

Supervisor(s)

Egon Elbre, Ilja Livenson

Defence year

2013