Automated Provisioning of Shared Services

Shared services, hosted in utility computing environments are becoming quite common in enterprises. These services could be clusters of application servers hosting various applications or even clusters of databases catering to multiple organizations within an enterprise. Automating the provisioning of these shared services is a difficult problem. We propose a model-based automation mechanism to provision such shared services. We demonstrate our model-based provisioning system in the case of a shared desktop service. The shared desktop service termed the "virtual desktop system" (VDS) hosts desktops on top of virtual machines. These desktop virtual machines are provisioned on consolidated data centers while users use thin clients to connect to their "virtual" desktops. We demonstrate how we use our model-based automation technique to simplify the provisioning of such desktops.