Contextualization: dynamic configuration of virtual machines

New VM instances are created from static templates that contain the basic configuration of the VM to achieve elasticity with regards to capacity. Instance specific settings can be injected into the VM during the deployment phase through means of contextualization. So far this is limited to a single data source and data remains static throughout the lifecycle of the VM. We present a layered approach to contextualization that supports different classes of contextualization data available from several sources. The settings are made available to the VM through virtual devices. Inside each VM data from different classes are layered on top of each other to create a unified file hierarchy. Context data can be modified during runtime by updating the contents of the virtual devices, making our approach the first contextualization approach to natively support recontextualization. Recontextualization enables runtime reconfiguration of an executing service and can act as a trigger and key enabler of self-* techniques. This trigger provides a service with a mechanism to adapt or optimize itself in response to a changing environment. The runtime reconfiguration using recontextualization and its potential gains are illustrated in an example with a distributed file system, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach.