ABSTRACT
Virtualization is an important enabling technology for many large private datacenters and cloud computing environments. Virtual machines often have complex expectations of their runtime environment such as access to a particular network segment or storage system. Similarly, the runtime environment may have complex expectations of a virtual machine's behavior such as compliance with network access control criteria or limits on the type and quantity of network traffic generated by the virtual machine. Today, these diverse requirements are too often specified, communicated and managed with non-portable, site specific, loosely coupled, and out-of-band processes. We propose Virtual Machine Contracts (VMCs), a platform independent way of automating the communication and management of such requirements. We describe how VMCs can be expressed through additions to the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) standard and how they can be managed in a uniform way even across environments with heterogeneous elements for enforcement. We explore use cases for this approach and argue that it is an essential step towards automated control and management of virtual machines in large datacenters and cloud computing environments.
- DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering Working Group, "Open Virtualization Format (OVF) Specification, Version 0.90", April 2008.Google Scholar
- M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. Joseph, R. Katz, A. Konwinski, G. Lee, D. Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, M. Zaharia, "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing", University of California at Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-209-28, February 10 2009.Google Scholar
- B-hive, Application Performance Management for VMware Infrastructure, http://www.bhive.net/.Google Scholar
- J. Fry, "Sorry, VMware: you don't need virtualization for cloud computing", http://datacenterdialog.blogspot.com/2009/02/sorry-vmware-you-dont-need.html, February 25 2009.Google Scholar
- VMsafe: A Security Technology for Virtualized Environments, http://www.vmware.com/overview/security/vmsafe.Google Scholar
- C. Hoff, "The Four Horsemen Of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse", Black Hat 2008.Google Scholar
- VMware Virtual Center, http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/.Google Scholar
- XenStore, http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenStore.Google Scholar
- VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, http://www.vmware.com/appliances.Google Scholar
- Bagvapp Virtual Appliance Repository, http://bagside.com/bagvapp.Google Scholar
- RPath, http://www.rpath.com.Google Scholar
- Thoughtpolice VMware Images, http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk.Google Scholar
- Jailtime, http://www.jailtime.org.Google Scholar
- J. Matthews, J. Herne, T. Deshane, P. Jablonski, L. Cherian, M. McCabe, "Data Protection and Rapid Recovery From Attack With A Virtual Private File Server and Virtual Machine Appliances", Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Communication, Network and Information Security (CNIS 2005), p. 170--181, November 2005.Google Scholar
- VMware Application vServices, http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/application.html.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Virtual machine contracts for datacenter and cloud computing environments
Recommendations
Adaptive Virtual Machine Management in the Cloud: A Performance-Counter-Driven Approach
The success of cloud computing technologies heavily depends on both the underlying hardware and system software support for virtualization. In this study, we propose to elevate the capability of the hypervisor to monitor and manage co-running virtual ...
A Technical Review for Efficient Virtual Machine Migration
CUBE '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Cloud & Ubiquitous Computing & Emerging TechnologiesThis paper presents the recent technical research survey on the efficient live migration of virtual machines. Virtual machine migration is required for many reasons like load balancing, energy reduction, dynamic resizing, and to increase availability. ...
Performance Measurement of Virtual Machine Migration Using Pre-copy Approach in cloud computing
ICTCS '16: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive StrategiesMigration is the method of sending virtual machine(s) (VMs) from one physical machine (PM) to other. Migration of VMs may be required for maintenance or up gradation of PMs without disturbing the executions being carried out by them. Unlike offline ...
Comments