Software evaluation management in an enterprise provisioning environment with virtual machines (16-Nov-2009)

Software evaluation management in an enterprise provisioning environment with virtual machines

Today there are some software products that can help in software distribution and asset management inventory in a multi-platform environment. Among other features that are supported by the majority of these products there is a proprietary package format and the use of integrated inventory database to determine targets for your software distribution. In particular it may be possible to create workflows, submit and monitor them across the enterprise and update the reference model to ensure continued compliance. The common way adopted is to use software package files that are pushed onto the target machine and installed them.

However, none of these software products is able to deliver a software installation to a configurable pre-existing virtual machine on the target machine, or to a new virtual machine that is created on purpose.

What is possible with currently available products is to manually perform a series of steps from separate user interfaces to achieve the same results, but these methods provide no transactional mechanism, no centralized management and finally a huge waste of time.

New cloud computing solutions are being designed to provide an automatic and end-to-end system that allows a Domain Administrator to deploy and customize virtual machines, installing at the same time configurable software. These available solutions, however, are targeted to complex enterprise environments that require large amount of costly resources, and are out of this disclosure scope.

It's the object of this disclosure to propose a method and a system to address the above issues providing an integrated and automatic system to automatically address a local virtual machine from a software package installed on a machine, or to set-up from the same software package a new virtual machine (along with its default software stack) within a target endpoint.

The proposed solution allows a Domain Administrator of an enterprise to push enhanced software packages onto a managed system, the enhancement being in allowing them to be targeted on demand to one of the local virtual machines, or to create a new virtual machine from scratch. The Domain Administrator will be able to perform in just one operation, ran at server side, all the configurations and customization needed for the new or already present virtual machines and for the software products that will run on it.

One typical use of this solution is:

Assuming the administrator has the need of installing to a target endpoint some evaluation software. To achieve this goal the intent could be to install and run such software inside a virtual machine configured on the fly in the context of the installation of

1

the software itself. In this way the host system is not impacted by any problem injected by the software. Before starting the actual software package in...