Virtual Workspaces - VWS

DEPRECATED: The most recent version is TP1.3.3.1

Version TP1.1 - Virtual Machines Technology Preview 1.1

This is a technology preview of the virtual machine based Workspace Service. The workspace service provides a gateway to a resource configured with the Xen (2.0.7 or 3.0) implementation of virtual machines.

The infrastructure is composed of:

1. The Workspace Factory Service implemented for the GT4 Java container that allows a grid client to deploy a Xen-based workspace (described by workspace metadata and a Xen image) according to a deployment request specifying resource allocation and length of deployment.

2. The Workspace Service implemented for the GT4 Java container that allows a Grid client to manage a workspace by starting, stopping, pausing, or destroying it. The service is required to be colocated with the Xen hypervisor installation (support for clusters is planned for a future release).

Workspace metadata and the interfaces for the two Grid Services are discussed in the interfaces section. The Administrator's Guide discusses the installation of the service and the required backend component.

A discussion of the available plugins and an authorization overview is in this section.

The service client is distributed with a sample metadata file and sample deployment request, each of which have inline comments and can thus be modified to reflect different deployment preferences.

You can download the software from the downloads page.

Changelog vs. TP1

This release consists of these noteworthy changes from TP1:

• Support for a new, "Allocate" networking method that allows the workspace service administrator to specify pools of IP addresses (and DNS information) which are then assigned to virtual machines on deployment.

• The resource properties have been extended to publish deployment information about a workspace, such as its IP address.

• Workspace metadata validation has been extended to support requirement checking for specific architecture, hypervisor version, and CPU. The workspace factory advertises the supported qualities as a resource property; the requirement section of workspace metadata is checked against the supported set.

• Authorization handling has been significantly extended. The workspace service can now accept and process VOMS credentials and SAML attributes (GridShib). Further, an authorization callout has been added to the service for fine grain policies. This callout can be configured to implementations of a simple attribute list lookup or a python script allowing for arbitrary authorization logic.

• Support for Xen3 has been added.

• The workspace client has been extended to accomodate new functionality. In addition the client interface has been extended to enable subscribing for notifications and specifying the resource allocation information at command-line.

• Installation has been improved -- the client now requires only a minimal installation (as opposed to the full service installation).