An Architecture Model for a Distributed Virtualization System

Abstract

The Thesis is about an architecture model for a Distributed Virtualization System, which could expand a virtual execution environment from a single physical machine to several nodes of a cluster. With current virtualization technologies, computing power and resource usage of Virtual Machines (or Containers) are limited to the physical machine where they run. To deliver high levels of performance and scalability, cloud applications are usually partitioned in several Virtual Machines (or Containers) located on different nodes of a virtualization cluster. Developers often use that processing model because the same instance of the operating system is not available on each node where their components run. The proposed architecture model is suitable for new trends in software development because it is inherently distributed. It combines and integrates Virtualization and Distributed Operating Systems technologies with the benefits of both worlds, providing the same isolated instance of a Virtual Operating System on each cluster node. Although it requires the introduction of changes in existing operating systems, thousands of legacy applications would not require modifications to obtain their benefits. A Distributed Virtualization System is suitable to deliver high-performance cloud services with provider-class features, such as high-availability, replication, migration, and load balancing. Furthermore, it is able to concurrently run several isolated instances of different guest Virtual Operating Systems, allocating a subset of nodes for each instance and sharing nodes between them. Currently, a prototype is running on a cluster of commodity hardware provided with two kinds of Virtual Operating Systems tailored for internet services (web server) as a proof of concept.