The Distributed Services Management Toolkit (DSMT) provides the tools for easy deployment and operation of an application on multiple PlanetLab nodes. DSMT contains make it easy to create PlanetLab slices, create slivers on PlanetLab nodes, install an application on the multiple nodes and monitor the operation on the nodes.

For a PlanetLab service deployer, DSMT will:

• select the PlanetLab nodes for your application
• install your application on those nodes
• monitor the operation of your application and restart nodes or reallocate nodes as necessary

A person wishing to run an application on multiple PlanetLab nodes uses the dsmtc command to specify the application parameters (RPMs, node selection policy, slice and application parameters). The DSMT system then allocates the PlanetLab virtual machines (containers) and installs and runs the application in all of the containers.

The application operator can then use various visualization and monitoring tools to access the installation progress of the application and on the application operational health.