<div dir="ltr"><br clear="all"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Dear all, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> We
would like to present an extension to the vm-booting functionality of Nova when
a number of homogeneous vms need to be launched at the same time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The motivation for our work is to increase the speed of provisioning vms for large-scale scientific
computing and big data processing. In that case, we often need to boot tens and
hundreds virtual machine instances at the same time. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> Currently, under the
Openstack, we found that creating a large number of virtual machine instances
is very time-consuming. </span><span style="text-indent:21pt">The reason is
the booting procedure is a centralized operation that involve performance
bottlenecks. Before a virtual machine can be actually started, OpenStack either
copy the image file (</span><span style="text-indent:21pt;color:red">swift</span><span style="text-indent:21pt">) or attach the image
volume (</span><span style="text-indent:21pt;color:red">cinder</span><span style="text-indent:21pt">) from storage server to compute node
via network. Booting a single VM need to read a large amount of image data from
the image storage server. So creating a large number of virtual machine
instances would cause a significant workload on the servers. The servers become
quite busy even unavailable during the deployment phase. It would consume a very
long time before the whole virtual machine cluster useable.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> Our
extension is based on our work on vmThunder, a novel mechanism accelerating
the deployment of large number virtual machine instances. It is written in
Python, can be integrated with OpenStack easily. VMThunder addresses the problem
described above by following improvements: on-demand transferring (network
attached storage), compute node caching, P2P transferring and prefetching.
VMThunder is a scalable and cost-effective accelerator for bulk provisioning of
virtual machines.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> We
hope to receive your feedbacks. Any comments are extremely welcome. Thanks in advance. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">PS: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">VMThunder enhanced nova blueprint: <a href="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/thunderboost">https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/thunderboost</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> VMThunder standalone project: <a href="https://launchpad.net/vmthunder">https://launchpad.net/vmthunder</a>;</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> VMThunder prototype: <a href="https://github.com/lihuiba/VMThunder">https://github.com/lihuiba/VMThunder</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> VMThunder etherpad: <a href="https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vmThunder"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,51,170);background-color:white;text-decoration:none">https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vmThunder</span></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> VMThunder portal: <a href="http://www.vmthunder.org/">http://www.vmthunder.org/</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:5.25pt"><span lang="EN-US">VMThunder paper: <a href="http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/td/preprint/06719385.pdf">http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/td/preprint/06719385.pdf</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:5.25pt"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:5.25pt"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">
Regards</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> vmThunder
development group</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> PDL</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">
National University of Defense Technology</span></p></div>
</div>