Virtuoso: A System For VirtualMachineMarketplaces
A. Shoykhet, John R. Lange, Peter A. Dinda · 2004
In most existing computing environments, resources such as CPU time, memory, disk space, and network bandwidth are not used to capacity. In future environments, such as computational grids, resources may exist solely for sale. There is no clean way for a resource provider to sell either kind of resource because the current abstractions an owner can provide (and a buyer can request) are (1) too high level, (2) numerous, and (3) complex. Virtuoso is a prototype system that creates a marketplace in which resources can be straightforwardly sold by resource providers to resource buyers. The resource exchange is in the form of a low level virtual machine and virtual network that presents the abstraction of a new raw physical machine on the buyer's network. This report describes the interface and implementation of the Virtuoso system. It is also a user manual for those who wish to try Virtuoso.