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Rethink the virtual machine template

Published:09 March 2011Publication History
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Abstract

Server virtualization technology facilitates the creation of an elastic computing infrastructure on demand. There are cloud applications like server-based computing and virtual desktop that concern startup latency and require impromptu requests for VM creation in a real-time manner. Conventional template-based VM creation is a time consuming process and lacks flexibility for the deployment of stateful VMs. In this paper, we present an abstraction of VM substrate to represent generic VM instances in miniature. Unlike templates that are stored as an image file in disk, VM substrates are docked in memory in a designated VM pool. They can be activated into stateful VMs without machine booting and application initialization. The abstraction leverages an arrange of techniques, including VM miniaturization, generalization, clone and migration, storage copy-on-write, and on-the-fly resource configuration, for rapid deployment of VMs and VM clusters on demand. We implement a prototype on a Xen platform and show that a server with typical configuration of TB disk and GB memory can accommodate more substrates in memory than templates in disk and stateful VMs can be created from the same or different substrates and deployed on to the same or different physical hosts in a cluster without causing any configuration conflicts. Experimental results show that general purpose VMs or a VM cluster for parallel computing can be deployed in a few seconds. We demonstrate the usage of VM substrates in a mobile gaming application.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 46, Issue 7
      VEE '11
      July 2011
      231 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2007477
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        VEE '11: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
        March 2011
        250 pages
        ISBN:9781450306874
        DOI:10.1145/1952682

      Copyright © 2011 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 9 March 2011

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