Global-scale Service Deployment in the XenoServer Platform
Evangelos Kotsovinos, Tim Moreton, Ian A. Pratt, Russ Ross, Keir Fraser, Steven J. Hand, Timothy L. Harris · 2004
We are building the XenoServer platform for global com-puting, a public infrastructure capable of safely hosting un-trusted distributed services on behalf of uncooperative pay-ing clients. Service components execute on one or more XenoServers within resource-managed Virtual Machines (VMs) which provide resource isolation, protection, and al-low the execution of arbitrary applications and services. To assist the deployment of services on the platform, we provide an effective solution that allows users to fully cus-tomize the VMs to be launched by specifying the operating system kernel image and distribution le-system to be used. Moreover, we have implemented mechanisms for facilitat-ing easy and efcient distribution of those kernel and le-system images; users build their VMs ' congurations once and use the platform to efciently launch VMs on large numbers of machines around the world. Initial experiences with our deployment infrastructure demonstrate that the platform provides a practical substrate for public global computing; we show how a complex ser-vice running on the user's own customized Linux environ-ment can be deployed to multiple XenoServers around the world in under 45 seconds. 1