Handling Boot Storms in Virtualized Data Centers—A Survey

Abstract

Large-scale virtual machine (VM) deployment in virtualized data centers is a very slow process. This is primarily due to the resource bottlenecks that are created at the storage, network, and host physical machines when a large number of VMs are requested simultaneously. For companies that provide virtual desktops to their employees, it is common to encounter such requests each day, when their employees turn up for work. In addition, a large number of VMs are often required to be deployed instantly, in order to absorb a spike in the workload, at online e-commerce websites. In such scenarios, long deployment times are unacceptable, and reducing them is of paramount importance. In this article, we first abstract out the key techniques suggested in the literature to speed up this deployment process. We follow this with a classification of these techniques into a taxonomy and propose a framework that can be used to compare them. Finally, we identify problem areas that warrant further research and bring out the shortcomings of the current state-of-the-art solutions.