IP address management in virtualized cloud environments

Abstract

The ability to deploy resources and services in cloud computing utilizing virtualization technologies in a timely and cost-effective manner is important, bringing with it significant economical gain and business performance, yet accelerating the pace of innovation. Services in cloud platforms are scheduled and executed in optimized and on-demand resources, taking into consideration flexibility and scalability. Due to the existing limitation on the quantity of allocated IPv4 IP addresses, a number of alternatives have been discussed. In this chapter, we propose a novel yet low-overhead method for cloud service providers based on the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) framework and network virtualization. The idea behind the design is to respond quickly to the infrastructure needs for the creation of virtual machines (VMs) that meet the capacity requirements of those cloud services as requested by users. It improves the utilization of providers' resources within this infrastructure as heterogeneous hardware resources are aggregated to the existing platform on demand. Testing on the prototype built demonstrates its effectiveness and performance. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.