Design and implementation of XML-based configuration management system for distributed systems

Abstract

Today, we are witnessing more distributed systems on enterprise networks and on the Internet. In general, a distributed system is composed of many subsystems. It is difficult to effectively manage the configuration information of distributed systems because they may be deployed with different software components and run on heterogeneous computing platforms. In addition, the configuration information of a subsystem has complex relations with the information of other subsystems, so it is difficult to provide automatic reconfiguration of related subsystems. To overcome the difficulties, we propose a management information model that considers the relations among subsystems and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as a communication method. This paper presents the design and implementation of X-CONF (XML-based configuration management system) for a distributed system. For validation, we have developed the X-CONF for NG-MON, which is a distributed and real-time Internet traffic monitoring and analysis system.