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Abstract: internet-based virtual computing environment (iVCE) has been proposed to combine data centers and other kinds of computing resources on the Internet to provide efficient and economical services. virtual machines (VMs) have been widely used in iVCE to isolate different users/jobs and ensure trustworthiness, but traditionally VMs require a long period of time for booting, which cannot meet the requirement of iVCE’s large-scale and highly dynamic applications. To address this problem, in this paper we design and implement VirtMan, a fast booting system for a large number of virtual machines in iVCE. VirtMan uses the Linux Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) target to remotely mount to the source image in a scalable hierarchy, and leverages the homogeneity of a set of VMs to transfer only necessary image data at runtime. We have implemented VirtMan both as a standalone system and for OpenStack. In our 100-server testbed, VirtMan boots up 1000 VMs (with a 15 GB image of Windows Server 2008) on 100 physical servers in less than 120 s, which is three orders of magnitude lower than current public clouds.

This interesting piece of work describes VirtMan, a fast booting system for a large number of virtual machines via the Linux SCSI target. The basic idea is the same described in a previous journal paper (VMThunder) by the same authors, that is to mount the VM image in a scalable hierarchy, transferring only necessary data at runtime. The novelty/addition here is mainly given by the integration with OpenStack, since a coordinator already existed in VMThunder.

VirtMan: iVCE环境下同构虚拟机大规模部署系统的设计与实现

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