Integration of Debian, Eucalyptus, and VMBuilder - my SummerOfCode2009 project

See the original proposal.

Background info

The purpose of this project is to improve Debian's support of virtualization and grid/cloud computing platforms. It's become popular nowadays to host servers on the Amazon EC2 computing 'cloud' - a sort of computing utility where you can purchase computing resources from Amazon. Users create images (called AMI) for EC2, upload them, and execute them at their leisure. They use the Xen hypervisor as the basis of this.

Eucalyptus was created by some University of California students (and later turned into a business venture). Like EC2, it also serves as a nice interface on top of Xen. It implements the EC2 interface, allowing people to setup their own private 'clouds' that work like EC2 and are compatible with the same tools.

Meanwhile, the Ubuntu Virtualization Team has produced an interesting piece of software called VMBuilder, which lets users create VM images easily. VMBuilder supports a lot of well known VMs, including recent support for creating, bundling, and uploading AMI

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to integrate Debian, Eucalyptus, and VMBuilder. The goal is to allow a regular user to build a Debian image with VMbuilder and use it with Amazon EC2 or a local ?Eucalypus cluster.