VMRC in a nutshell

The benefits of Cloud computing has leveraged organizations to deploy private Clouds to give computational support to their IT activities. The widespread usage of virtualization requires creating Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) , which encapsulate the required hardware and software configuration to successfully execute an application in a sandbox. Different applications impose different software and hardware requirements to the VMIs. This has led to a massive creation of VMIs which must be properly indexed in order to leverage both their reuse and sharing (either internally or within the community).

For that, VMRC is a catalog and repository of Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) that enables the users (and/or Cloud administrators) to index and store the VMIs together with the appropriate metadata that describes their hardware and software features. The system offers matchmaking capabilities so that user's can specify their requirements to the catalog and the system retrieves the most appropriate VMIs that satisfy the given requirements.

The VMRC system can be deployed within a private Cloud to store the different VMIs required to provision the services. It can also index VMIs stored within other Cloud providers. In addition, it can be employed to federate different private Clouds so that a single VMRC entity can provide the images for different Clouds. The catalog itself is hypervisor-agnostic and it uses the Open Virtual Format (OVF) specification .

It is a web service that features a web-based GUI, a web-services API, a client-side Java API and a command-line application. Being developed in Java, it is inherently multi-platform and it can seamlessly work in Windows, OS X and Linux.