Bottom-up harmonisation of management attributes describing hypervisors and virtual machines

The advent of host virtualization has increased the number of management attribute classes and instances. At the same time an additional degree of heterogeneity has been introduced, due to different hypervisor products coupled with multiple guest operating systems. These changes obviate provisionary methods of harmonising management information. We analyse the problem dimensions of attribute harmonisation according to a common management scenario and show why heterogeneity at hypervisor and VM level is difficult to deal with at present. In response, we present a classification of bottom-up attribute matching patterns and propose a methodology for the systematic processing of management attributes. As a proof-of-concept, we describe our implementation of an attribute normalising framework extending the libvirt library.