The University of California, San Diego
UCSD

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  1. Overview
  2. News
  3. Publications
  4. Project Status

Overview

Usher is a virtual machine management framework for cluster environments under development at UCSD. Usher's management framework was designed to impose few constraints upon the computing environment under its management. Usher allows for an administrator to choose how his virtual machine environment will be setup and the policies under which it will be managed. The modular design of Usher allows for alternate implementations for authentication, authorization, infrastructure handling, logging, and virtual machine scheduling. The design philosophy of Usher is to provide an interface whereby users and administrators can request virtual machine operations (e.g., start, stop, migrate, etc.) while delegating administrative tasks for these operations out to smart plugins. Usher's implementation allows for arbitrary action to be taken for nearly any event in the system.

Usher is written in Python and is general enough to work with any virtual machine monitor1 for which an Usher wrapper has been written (currently only Xen, but others are in the works). For more information about Usher, refer to the Documentation page.

News

Read the latest Usher news here.

Publications

Usher: An Extensible Framework for Managing Clusters of Virtual Machines, Marvin McNett, Diwaker Gupta, Amin Vahdat, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference, (Slides)(BibTex)(LISA 2007).

Project Status

Usher has been in use at UCSD since January 2007 with much success. The code is available for download under the BSD License. To see what's currently happening on our Usher cluster, check out the Ganglia statistics.

[1] E.g. Xen, VMWare, KVM, etc.

Last Updated: 2008-05-16 by mmcnett
Report problems to: Marvin McNett

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0615392. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).