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Rethink the virtual machine template
| Venue: | in ACM SIGPLAN Notices |
| Citations: | 3 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Wang_rethinkthe,
author = {Kun Wang and Jia Rao and Cheng-zhong Xu},
title = {Rethink the virtual machine template},
journal = {in ACM SIGPLAN Notices},
year = {},
pages = {39--50}
}
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Abstract
Server virtualization technology facilitates the creation of an elastic computing infrastructure on demand. There are cloud applications like server-based computing and virtual desktop that concern startup latency and require impromptu requests for VM creation in a real-time manner. Conventional template-based VM creation is a time consuming process and lacks flexibility for the deployment of statefull VMs. In this paper, we present an abstraction of VM substrate to represent generic VM instances in miniature. Unlike templates that are stored as an image file in disk, VM substrates are docked in memory in a designated VM pool. They can be activated into statefull VMs without machine booting and application initialization. The abstraction leverages an arrange of techniques, including VM miniaturization, generalization, clone and migration, storage copy-on-write, and on-the-fly resource configuration, for rapid deployment of VMs and VM clusters on demand. We implement a prototype on a Xen platform and show that a server with typical configuration of TB disk and GB memory can accommodate more substrates in memory than templates in disk and statefull VMs can be created from the same or different substrates and deployed on to the same or different physical hosts in a cluster without causing any configuration conflicts. Experimental results show that general purpose VMs or a VM cluster for parallel computing can be deployed in a few seconds. We demonstrate the usage of VM substrates in a mobile gaming application.
Keyphrases
virtual machine template vm substrate statefull vms vm cluster vm miniaturization on-the-fly resource configuration parallel computing tb disk server-based computing server virtualization technology image file vm creation typical configuration xen platform rapid deployment gb memory conventional template-based vm creation concern startup latency machine booting cloud application configuration conflict designated vm pool mobile gaming application real-time manner generic vm instance general purpose vms impromptu request elastic computing infrastructure different substrate application initialization virtual desktop different physical host experimental result
