Iceberg: An Image Streamer for Space and Time Efficient Provisioning of Virtual Machines
Lei Shi, Mohammad Banikazemi, Qing Bo Wang · Proceedings - International Workshops on Parallel Processing · 2008
Platform and resource virtualization is evolving as an enabling technology to consolidate servers and to simplify the management of enterprise servers. Provisioning of Virtual Machines (VM) on demand is a key component of such environments. This paper presents Iceberg, a space and time efficient image streamer for provisioning VMs. Iceberg operates at block storage (image) leveland is OS, Hypervisor, and file system agnostic. Iceberg is a chunk-based distributed image streamer which provides instant provisioning of VMs over the network. Iceberg utilizes a variable-size, content-based slicing algorithm such that the sharing among images is improved and storage space requirement is reduced significantly. We provide a comprehensive study of sharing among several different types of images and show up to 60% content sharing between two images. Much higher storage space saving can be achieved among a large number of similar images.