• Investigated technologies
  • Olive (olivearchive.org): mainly developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Three main ideas: Internet Suspend/Resume (allow a user to start using a VM before it is fully downloaded), indexing and searching of VM images, incrementally composing VM images. The last 2 have been done in Docker, below.

Impression: academic quality, feature and quality do not seem a good fit for Brown Dog project.

• • OpenVZ (openvz.org): a community project, supported by the company Parallels, Inc. An OS-level virtualization technology based on the Linux kernel and

    OS.

Impression: server consolidation, web hosting. Seems to be production quality. For Linux only, so at least does not seem a good fit for the high-level VM architecture technology.

• • Docker (docker.com): automates the deployment of applications inside software containers, providing abstraction and automation of operating system–level virtualization on Linux.
    
    Impression: popular, under active development. Similar to OpenVZ, an OS-level virtualization technology: a container runs the same kernel as the host, so at least does not seem a good fit for the high-level VM architecture technology. OpenVZ functionality + distributed architecture to set up repositories and pull images from and push images to the repositories.
  • OpenStack (openstack.org).

As a hardware virtualization technology, OpenStack supports multiple OSes, such as Linux and Windows.

• • Current choice:

Brown Dog VM elasticity project needs to support multiple OSes, so OpenStack seems a viable high level solution. Currently considering using OpenStack.  May consider using Docker on the VMs if needed.