Adaptation of Distributed File System to VDI Storage by Client-Side Cache
Chei-Yol Kim, Sangmin Lee, Young‐Kyun Kim, Dae-Wha Seo · Journal of Computers · 2016
Distributed File system was widely used as a cloud computing backend storage with high scalability, low cost, and reasonable sequential I/O performance. VDI I/O workload is mostly composed of small random I/O and distributed file system does not have enough performance for this I/O pattern. Compensating for this gap, we applied a cache using memory and SSD (Solid State Drive) to distributed file system. This cache was implemented in the file system's client side. It uses memory as write cache and SSD as read cache with write-back policy for minimizing the I/O response time. Based distributed file system was implemented on user-level using Fuse (File system in User space) framework. When the client-side cache was used, the file server which previously could not support even 1024 users was improved enough to support more than 3000 users. By applying the client-side cache, it is possible to solve the performance drawback of the distributed file system used for VDI storage.