Parallax: A Virtual Storage System
Andrew Warfield
Operating system virtualization represents a fundamental change in the
way clusters of computers are managed. Consider two examples: First,
live OS migration allows an entire running server to be moved to a new
physical host for load-balancing or maintenance. Second,
check-pointing and replay allow fine-grained examination of past
system states, benefiting forensic tasks such as debugging and
intrusion detection.
The new capabilities afforded by OS virtualization have a considerable
impact on the requirements for storage management. VM clusters have
more (virtual) hosts, migration requires greater availability of data,
and check-pointing means more data must be stored. In this talk, I
will discuss our early work on Parallax, a distributed storage system
for virtual machine clusters using local disks.
This is joint work with Keir Fraser, Steve Hand, Christian Limpach,
and Russ Ross.
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