SSD-HDD-hybrid virtual disk in consolidated environments

Abstract

With the prevalence of multi-core processors and cloud computing, the server consolidation using virtualization has increasingly expanded its territory, and the degree of consolidation has also become higher. As a large number of virtual machines individually require their own disks, the storage capacity of a data center could be exceeded. To address this problem, copy-on-write storage systems allow virtual machines to initially share a template disk image. This paper proposes a hybrid copy-on-write storage system that combines solid-state disks and hard disk drives for consolidated environments. In order to take advantage of both devices, the proposed scheme places a read-only template disk image on a solid-state disk, while write operations are isolated to the hard disk drive. In this hybrid architecture, the disk I/O performance benefits from the fast read access of the solid-state disk, especially for random reads, precluding write operations from the degrading flash memory performance. We show that the hybrid virtual disk, in terms of performance and cost, is more effective than the pure copy-on-write disks for a highly consolidated system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.