The development of new OSCAR packages and of new releases is difficult because of the testing required for the ever growing set of supported Linux distributions. Each time, a new cluster has to be setup, including the full installation of the headnode system.
At the same time, some paravirtualization software, like Xen, allows one to create a set of virtual machines on a single physical machine. Therefore, the use of Xen for cluster virtualization and OSCAR testing may be interesting.
This document presents Xen-OSCAR, a framework based on Xen, which aims at providing a solution to create a virtual OSCAR cluster.