The Improvement of Automating the Guest OS Configuration of Virtual Machines Deployed from Templates: A Case Study

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of automating system administration within a virtualized server environment. For system administrators, creation and configuration of new Virtual Machines has shown to be a common, and yet time and manual labour consuming task. Thus, this process has been studied thoroughly to find out in what degree it will lend itself to automation. The nature of the process was found to be well-suited for a high degree of automation. The automation tool is developed, presented and evaluated. A series of quantitative tests were orchestrated, testing both manual configuration and configuration by using the tool. The results were analysed, and it became visible that the manual configuration has an interruptive behaviour which is not the case in the produced process. The time improvements of the automation are approximated from the gathered test data and the results show a significant improvement in process speed-up with a test average of 300% corresponding to roughly 22 minutes per configured VM. Note that when calculating time saving and process speed-up the assumption is made that two employees are depending on the configuration which has been seen often to be the case. This work has shed light on the need for a more holistic estimation model of calculating process speed-up when you have factors as multiple people being dependent on a process and added time due to loss of operator focus (e.g. due to interruptive behaviour during the process). Furthermore, a strong case is made for the implementation of process automation in administrat ive tasks within virtualized server environments.