Using a Web-based Framework to Manage Grid Deployments. Georgios Oikonomou 1 and Theodore Apostolopoulos 1 1 Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece Abstract - WebDMF is a Web-based Framework for the Management of Distributed services. It is based on the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards family and introduces a middleware layer of entities called “Representatives”. Details related to the managed application are detached from the representative logic, making the framework suitable for a variety of services. WebDMF can be integrated with existing WBEM infrastructures and is complementary to web service-based management efforts. This paper describes how the framework can be used to manage grids without modifications to existing installations. It compares the proposed solution with other research initiatives. Experiments on an emulated network topology indicate its viability. Keywords: WebDMF, Grid Management, Distributed Services Management, Web-based Enterprise Management, Common Information Model. 1 Introduction During the past decades the scenery in computing and networking has undergone revolutionary changes. From the era of single, centralised systems we are steadily moving to an era of highly decentralised, interconnected nodes that share resources in order to provide services transparently to the end user. Traditionally, legacy management approaches such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [1], targeted single nodes. The current paradigm presents new challenges and increases complexity in the area of network and systems management. There is need for solutions that view a distributed deployment as a whole, instead of as a set of isolated hosts. The Web-based Distributed Management Framework (WebDMF) is the result of our work detailed in [2]. It is a framework for the management of distributed services and uses standard web technologies. Its core is based on the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) family of specifications [3], [4], [5]. It is not limited to monitoring but is also capable of modifying the run-time parameters of the managed service. Finally, it has a wide target group. It can perform the management of a variety of distributed systems, such as distributed file systems, computer clusters and computational or data grids. However, multiprocessor, multi-core, parallel computing and similar systems are considered out of the scope of our work, even though they are very often referred to as “distributed”. The main contribution of this paper is three-fold: • We demonstrate how a WebDMF deployment can be used for the management of a grid, without any modification to existing WBEM management infrastructures. • We provide indications for the viability of the approach through a preliminary performance evaluation. • We show that WebDMF is not competitive to emerging Web Service-based grid management initiatives. Instead, it is a step towards the same direction. Section 2 summarizes some recent approaches in the field of grid management and compares our work with those efforts. In order to familiarize the reader with some basic concepts, section 3 presents a short introduction to the WBEM family of standards. In section 4 we briefly describe WebDMF’s architecture and some implementation details. In the same section we demonstrate how the framework can be used to manage grids. Finally, we discuss the relationship between WebDMF and Web Service-based management and we present some preliminary evaluation results. Section 5 presents our conclusions. 2 Related Work – Motivation In this section we aim to outline some of the research initiatives in the field of grid management. The brief review is limited to the most recent ones. 2.1 Related Work An important approach is the one proposed by the Open Grid Forum (OGF). OGF’s Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) uses an event producer – event consumer model to monitor grid resources [6]. However, as the name suggests, GMA is limited to monitoring. It lacks active management and configuration capabilities.