Virtual Machines are often used by directly logging into them either using a VNC or RDP protocols. However in the case of using Virtual Machines in grid computing, we need an automated way of communicating with virtual machines without requiring the user to interact manually with each machine.

For my honours project I needed the ability to create ISO images on the fly and push files stored on the host OS to the ISO image. This ISO image was then passed to the virtual machine for reading files into the guest OS.

As part of my honours project I wanted the ability to create and format virtual machine disk images as required. My honours project is using QEMU RAW file format and VMWare’s VMDK format as this stage but I have only implemented the RAW file format at this stage for my project.