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= 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 monitor^1^ for which an Usher wrapper has been written (currently only [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ Xen], but others are in the works). For more information about Usher, refer to the [UsherDocumentation Documentation] page.

= News =

Read the latest Usher news [UsherNews here].

= Publications =

'''[http://usher.ucsd.edu/downloads/papers/usher-lisa07.pdf 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'', ([http://usher.ucsd.edu/downloads/papers/usher-lisa07-pres.pdf Slides])([wiki:BibTeX BibTex])([http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/ 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 [http://usher.ucsd.edu/ganglia Ganglia] statistics.


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![1] E.g. [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ Xen], [http://www.vmware.com/ VMWare], [http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki KVM], etc. 

Last Updated: [[LastModified]][[BR]]
Report problems to: [mailto:mmcnett@cs.ucsd.edu?subject=Usher_Issue Marvin McNett]
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<font style="font-size: 80%; color: #A8A8A8">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).</font>
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