Accessing federated clouds in EGI with VMOps Dashboard

The VMOps dashboard provides users with a set of graphical interfaces to high-level services, in order to manage Virtual Machines and Virtualized Appliances on federated cloud infrastructures, particularly on the EGI Federated Cloud and community-specific cloud federations.

The EGI Federated Cloud brings together resources from IaaS providers, built around open standards, focusing on the requirements of the scientific community. Rising above the challenge of bringing together distributed platforms, it features a unified authentication and authorization mechanism, a shared image catalogue, centralized monitoring and accounting, and, through the VMOps dashboard, a centralized way of deploying, managing, and accessing VMs and resources. Users are provided at a glance with an overview of the cloud with respect to provider availability based on their current status, and a 4-step wizard to deploy topologies based on the VM images and the VOs each provider supports, thus significantly reducing the burden of searching for the appropriate resources.