Going Back and Forth: Efficient Multi-deployment and Multi-snapshotting on Clouds
Cloud computing has changed the way people think of using resources. Especially, the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) allows users to make use of unlimited resources in pay per use fashion. Virtualization is the technology based on which the cloud service providers are able to provide or share computational resources and data centers to users. Though this approach is practical, it throws certain challenges in terms of designing and development of IaaS middleware. One such challenge is the need for deploying thousands of VM instances to meet the requirements of growing number of users. In the process another challenge is to snapshot multiple images and persisting them towards management tasks like stopping VMs temporarily and resuming them as and when required. The presence of data centers in different configurations enables the simultaneous deployment and snapshotting is important. This capability should be coupled with another feature that is the whole mechanism should be hypervisor independent. To achieve this, a new virtual file system is proposed in this paper. This is basing on lazy transfer scheme with VM optimization and object versioning that takes care of multi-snapshotting and multi-deployment simultaneously and effectively. The experiments have shown that the new filing system and related techniques have improved performance, and bandwidth utilization is reduced by 90%.
