Kumoi: A High-Level Scripting Environment for Collective Virtual Machines

Abstract

We have designed and implemented a scripting environment called "Kumoi" for managing collective VMs in a large-scale data center. Kumoi is unlike other scripting environments because it exploits strong typing with type inference and high-level description. Kumoi introduces several advancements, including treating virtual machines as first-class objects and decoupling the scripting model and its execution for hiding as many details as possible. We implemented Kumoi as an embedded domain-specific language based on Scala along with distributed agents running on each physical machine. Evaluation using example scripts showed that an administrator can more concisely write the instructions for performing complex VM lifecycle management tasks. Use of this environment should improve management efficiency and agility.