Challenges in supporting virtual infrastructures in the cloud

Abstract

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is one of the main paradigms of cloud computing, where virtual infrastructures -- individual virtual machines (VMs) or mutually isolated networks of VMs -- are created in datacenters for cloud users. In this talk, I will discuss a number of research challenges in supporting virtual infrastructures in the cloud, in the aspects of performance, reliability, and security. I will then report our recent efforts in (1) optimizing VM network transport performance and (2) supporting virtual networked infrastructure reliability in datacenters. In the first effort, we propose and instantiate the methodology of protocol responsibility offloading to mitigate the impact of VM consolidation on VM TCP transport throughput. In the second effort, we develop a technique that takes live, distributed snapshots of virtual networked infrastructures for future recovery or replay. I will present both network-level and application-level evaluation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions.