Open Stack

Dear all,



 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.



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.


    Currently, under the Openstack, we found that creating a large number
of virtual machine instances is very time-consuming. 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 (swift) or attach the image volume (cinder) 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.



  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.



  We hope to receive your feedbacks. Any comments are extremely welcome.
Thanks in advance.



PS:



VMThunder enhanced nova blueprint:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/thunderboost

 VMThunder standalone project: https://launchpad.net/vmthunder;

 VMThunder prototype: https://github.com/lihuiba/VMThunder

 VMThunder etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vmThunder

 VMThunder portal: http://www.vmthunder.org/

VMThunder paper: http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/td/preprint/06719385.pdf



  Regards



  vmThunder development group

  PDL

  National University of Defense Technology
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