Experiences with Content Addressable Storage and Virtual Disks
Abstract:
Efficiently managing storage is important for virtualized computing
environments.
Its importance is magnified by developments such as cloud computing which
consolidate many thousands of virtual machines (and their associated storage).
The nature of this storage is such that there is a large amount of
duplication between otherwise discreet virtual machines.
Building upon previous work in content addressable storage, we have built a
prototype for consolidating virtual disk images using a service-oriented file
system.
It provides a hierarchical organization, manages historical snapshots of
drive images, and takes steps to optimize encoding based on partition type and
file system.
In this paper we present our experiences with building this prototype and
using it to store a variety of drive images for QEMU and the Linux
Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM).
Eric Van Hensbegren
2008-11-04
