ENTICE VM Image Analysis and Optimised Fragmentation

Akos Hajnal,Attila Csaba Marosi,Jozsef Kovacs,Peter Kacsuk,Robert Lovas,Gabor Kecskemeti

doi:10.1007/s10723-018-9430-x

Abstract

Virtual machine (VM) images (VMIs) often share common parts of significant size as they are stored individually. Using existing de-duplication techniques for such images are non-trivial, impose serious technical challenges, and requires direct access to clouds' proprietary image storages, which is not always feasible. We propose an alternative approach to split images into shared parts, called fragments, which are stored only once. Our solution requires a reasonably small set of base images available in the cloud, and additionally only the increments will be stored without the contents of base images, providing significant storage space savings. Composite images consisting of a base image and one or more fragments are assembled on-demand at VM deployment. Our technique can be used in conjunction with practically any popular cloud solution, and the storage of fragments is independent of the proprietary image storage of the cloud provider.

Highlights

As cloud computing users and providers face the ever changing demands of a wide range of highly connected and autonomous applications, the backbones of clouds are frequently tested to their limits
The most stressful operation for these dynamic scenarios is the creation of new Virtual machine (VM), which requires the duplication of the substantially sized virtual machine disk contents
To evaluate our proposed techniques, we have set up 2 scenarios each with increasing complexity

Summary

Introduction

As cloud computing users and providers face the ever changing demands of a wide range of highly connected and autonomous applications, the backbones of clouds are frequently tested to their limits. One of the demanding requirements of recent scenarios like Internet of things to cloud integration is the rapid construction and destruction of computing infrastructure components often hosted in a federation of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. These operations depend on the cloud provider’s specialised storage area networks that aim at serving, replicating, storing and distributing the disk volumes for the VMs used within the customer’s computing infrastructures. The most stressful operation for these dynamic scenarios is the creation of new VMs, which requires the duplication of the substantially sized virtual machine disk contents (called Virtual Machine Images - or VMIs). The most notable techniques here are copy-on-write (which does not duplicate VMIs on VM creation, instead only keeps track of the written parts of the VMIs for the user’s VMs – [21]) and de-duplication (which analyses VMIs stored in the system for common blocks and only stores the unique ones – [18, 22])

Methods

Results

Conclusion