Deployment of grid gateways using virtual machines

Grid-Ireland, the national computational grid for Ireland, has a centrally managed core infrastructure: the installation and configuration of grid gateways at constituent sites are controlled from an Operations Centre based at Trinity College Dublin. We have developed tools to automate and simplify the deployment of Grid middleware to these sites. Virtual machine (VM) technology has performed an important role, allowing us to maximise the utilisation of server hardware and to simplify installation and management procedures. By running multiple OS instances, each on a VM, a full LCG-compatible Grid gateway can be hosted on a single computer. This has significantly reduced the hardware, installation and management investment needed to deploy a new site. In this paper, we summarise an evaluation of competing VM technologies and relate our experience with virtual machines to date. We also describe a single-computer Grid gateway based on the Xen VM system which we plan to deploy to eleven new sites in early 2005.