SmART: an application reconfiguration framework

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.

Among the information technology sectors is the virtualization sector, which stands out by being a very active area, with many collaborations and advances. Virtualization’s benefits are plenty. Some of them are the massive server consolidation, reduced cooling, structural and electrical costs and the isolation between virtual machines. Virtual appliance is a concept resulting from the advancements on virtualization, and defines an alternative software distribution model from those existing by then, such as the traditional CD-ROM distribution, software as a service and hardware appliances. This model allows customers to have their IT solution fully specified and optimized for the task it must perform. With the virtual appliance outbreak, many servers using different applications tend to gather on the same physical machine. The applications, in turn, may implement plenty configuration formats, from widely adopted standards to proprietary formats. The configuration of these applications is typically carried by busy system administrators, who must dedicate some of their time coping such a vast configuration format range. This thesis contributes for the nourishing of the virtual appliance concept and proposes the creation of a tool which automatically configures applications inside virtual appliances, regardless of the application being configured. The contributions on this area are, therefore, very rare, which elevates this dissertation to a pioneer of the area. The approach for the problem of automatic application configuration explores the frequently found patterns in configuration files. Typically, those files use similar concepts, such as parameter definitions, parameter blocks and comments. Besides this, only some files were found to implement other concepts, although on a punctual basis. This dissertation proposes a framework for the automatic configuration of applications based on this characteristic. A configuration file is transformed to a structured and application-independent language, like the eXtended Markup Language, which is then modified and reverted to its original syntax.