Efficient service deployment by image-aware VM allocation strategy

Abstract

Cloud computing centers face the key challenge of rapidly provisioning diverse virtual machines (VMs) to efficiently deploy services in an elastic and scalable manner. VMs are created by instantiating VM images which encapsulate the required applications or services with their support environment. Thus, the rapid provisioning of VM images is an important factor of efficient service deployment. However, rapid service deployment is determined not only by efficiently VM images fetch but also by request patterns, placement and caching strategies. Thus, in this paper, we explore those effects, and present an image-aware VM allocation strategy to speed up service deployment. Our experiments show that our proposed algorithm largely improves the deployment efficiency. Moreover, the algorithm improves the utilization of cache space and alleviates network traffic. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.