Conference
Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing
About: Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Virtualization & Cloud computing. Over the lifetime, 36 publications have been published by the conference receiving 905 citations.
Papers
IBM1
TL;DR: A virtual appliance model is introduced which treats virtual images as building blocks for composite solutions and is transformed to a cloud-specific virtual solution deployment model used to generate a parameterized deployment plan that can be executed by an unskilled user.
Abstract: The combination of virtual server technology and the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) approach to utility computing promises to revolutionize the way in which distributed software services are deployed. Server virtualization technology can be used to capture complete reusable software stacks, shifting the complexity of middleware installation and configuration from deployment to packaging. IaaS clouds provide a set of interfaces for controlling virtual machines and configuring their hardware and network environment, substantially reducing the complexity of service provisioning. In this paper we identify and tackle a few of the remaining challenges in fulfilling the promise of radical simplification of distributed software service composition and deployment. We propose an approach and architecture for composition and deployment of virtual software services in cloud environments. We introduce a virtual appliance model which treats virtual images as building blocks for composite solutions. Virtual appliances use a port abstraction to negotiate their communication parameters. A solution architect creates a virtual solution model by composing virtual appliances and defining requirements on the environment in a cloud-independent manner. The virtual solution model is transformed to a cloud-specific virtual solution deployment model used to generate a parameterized deployment plan that can be executed by an unskilled user. We validated our approach through a prototype implementation demonstrating flexible composition and automated deployment in our local lab virtualization infrastructure and in Amazon EC2.
162 citations
15 Jun 2015
TL;DR: This paper considers how to best integrate container technology into an existing workflow system, using Makeflow, Work Queue, and Docker as examples of current technology.
Abstract: Workflows are a widely used abstraction for representing large scientific applications and executing them on distributed systems such as clusters, clouds, and grids. However, workflow systems have been largely silent on the question of precisely what environment each task in the workflow is expected to run in. As a result, a workflow may run correctly in the environment in which it was designed, but when moved to another machine, is highly likely to fail due to differences in the operating system, installed applications, available data, and so forth. Lightweight container technology has recently arisen as a potential solution to this problem, by providing a well-defined execution environments at the operating system level. In this paper, we consider how to best integrate container technology into an existing workflow system, using Makeflow, Work Queue, and Docker as examples of current technology. A brief performance study of Docker shows very little overhead in CPU and I/O performance, but significant costs in creating and deleting containers. Taking this into account, we describe four different methods of connecting containers to different points of the infrastructure, and explain several methods of managing the container images that must be distributed to executing tasks. We explore the performance of a large bioinformatics workload on a Docker-enabled cluster, and observe the best configuration to be locally-managed containers that are shared between multiple tasks.
127 citations
15 Jun 2009
TL;DR: This document presents the design and evaluation of a system that enables live migration of VMs running large enterprise applications without severely disrupting their live services, even across the Internet.
Abstract: Recent developments in virtualisation technology have resulted in its proliferation of usage across datacentres. Ultimately, the goal of this technology is to more efficiently utilise server resources to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by abstracting hardware and consolidating servers. This results in lower equipment costs and less electrical consumption for server power and cooling. However, the TCO benefits of holistic virtualisation extend beyond server assets. One of these aspects relates to the ability of being able to migrate Virtual Machines (VM) across distinct physical hosts over a network. However, limitations of the current migration technology start to appear when they are applied on larger application systems such as SAP ERP or SAP ByDesign. Such systems consume a large amount of memory and cannot be transferred as seamlessly as smaller ones, creating service interruption. Limiting the impact and optimising migration becomes even more important with the generalisation of Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this document we present our design and evaluation of a system that enables live migration of VMs running large enterprise applications without severely disrupting their live services, even across the Internet. By combining well-known techniques and innovative ones we can reduce system down-time and resource impact for migrating live, large Virtual Execution Environments.
86 citations
15 Jun 2009
TL;DR: A transparent, relocatable I/O mechanism for VM migration that efficiently prefetches not-yet-cached blocks by exploiting the available bandwidth of WAN, thereby minimizing temporary performance degradation of the migrating VM system.
Abstract: Live migration of virtual machines is a key technology for the next generation of IaaS cloud services, contributing to dynamic portability and mobility of VM-based services among datacenters. The practical use of live migration, however, is still limited inside a single datacenter. In WAN environments, network latencies cause inevitable I/O performance degradation of remotely-shared storage between source and destination sites; which is required to continue disk access of VMs before/after live migration. In our previous work, we proposed a transparent, relocatable I/O mechanism for VM migration, which enables VM disk images to be completely migrated to remote nodes without any modification of virtual machine monitors. In this paper, we present detailed performance evaluation of the proposed system, emulating a realistic WAN environment between remote datacenters. Experiments showed the proposed system achieved feasible I/O performance for various workloads including I/O intensive applications. Its background copy mechanism efficiently prefetches not-yet-cached blocks by exploiting the available bandwidth of WAN, thereby minimizing temporary performance degradation of the migrating VM system.
80 citations
8 Jun 2011
TL;DR: This paper proposes an advanced VM consolidation system exploiting postcopy live migration, which greatly alleviates performance degradation and achieves a higher degree of performance assurance than using precopy migration.
Abstract: Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) through live migration is a promising technology for IaaS datacenters. VMs are dynamically packed onto fewer server nodes, thereby eliminating excessive power consumption. Existing studies on VM consolidation, however, are based on precopy live migration, which requires dozens of seconds to switch the execution hosts of VMs. It is difficult to optimize VM locations quickly on sudden load changes, resulting in serious violations of VM performance criteria. In this paper, we propose an advanced VM consolidation system exploiting postcopy live migration, which greatly alleviates performance degradation. VM locations are reactively optimized in response to ever-changing resource usage. Sudden overloading of server nodes are promptly resolved by quickly switching the execution hosts of VMs. We have developed a prototype of our consolidation system and evaluated its feasibility through experiments. Our results show that our consolidation system achieved a higher degree of performance assurance than using precopy migration. Performance degradation is 12% or less, even for memory-intensive workloads, which is less than half the level using precopy migration.
68 citations
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 5 |
| 2013 | 8 |
| 2012 | 9 |
| 2011 | 5 |
| 2009 | 9 |