What is the VMOps Dashboard

The EGI Applications Database (AppDB) has expanded its core functionality with a new dashboard: the Virtual Machine Operations (VMOps) dashboard.

In short, the VMOps provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that performs Virtual Machine (VM) management operations on the EGI Federated Cloud under a number of supported Virtual Organizations.

The dashboard introduces a user-friendly environment where users can create and manage VMs along with associated storage devices on any of the EGI Federated Cloud providers. It provides a complete view of the deployed applications and a unified resource management experience, independently of the technology driving each of the resource centers of the federation.

Users can create new infrastructure topologies, which include a set of VMs, their associated storage and contextualization, a wizard-like builder that guides them through the selection of the virtual appliances, virtual organization, resource provider, and the final customization of the VMs that will be deployed. Its tight integration with the AppDB Cloud Marketplace allows for an automatic discovery of the appliances which are supported at each resource provider Once a topology has been created, VMOps allows management actions to be applied both on the set of VMs comprising a topology and on fine-grained actions on each individual VM.

The dashboard removes the need for users to own X.509 certificates. They can now log in to the EGI Check-in service and use their institutional credential to see details about their membership to virtual organizations.

VMOps then accesses resources on behalf of the user by employing temporary credentials, which are obtained via the RCAuthMasterPortal, or by employing Per-User-Sub-Proxy technologies, depending on the level of integration of each VO.

The VMOps dashboard also integrates with the EGI ARGO Monitoring Service and with the EGI GOCDB to present the status of the providers and any scheduled downtimes on a single view, allowing users to select the most appropriate providers.

Last but not least, it has been designed with a scalable architecture composed by a front-end and several back-ends for load balancing and provides a RESTful API which other services can use for integration.