VMThunder: Fast provisioning of large-scale virtual machine clusters

Abstract

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allows users to rent resources from the Cloud to meet their various computing requirements. The pay-as-you-use model, however, poses a nontrivial technical challenge to the IaaS cloud service providers: how to fast provision a large number of virtual machines (VMs) to meet users' dynamic computing requests? We address this challenge with VMThunder, a new VM provisioning tool, which downloads data blockson demand during the VM booting process and speeds up VM image streaming by strategically integrating peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming techniques with enhanced optimization schemes such as transfer on demand, cache on read, snapshot on local, and relay on cache. In particular, VMThunder stores the original images in a share storage and in the meantime it adopts a tree-based P2P streaming scheme so that common image blocks are cached and reused across the nodes in the cluster. We implement VMThunder in CentOS Linux and thoroughly test its performance. Comprehensive experimental results show that VMThunder outperforms the state-of-the-art VM provisioning methods, with respect to scalability, latency, and VM runtime I/O performance.