Iceberg: An image streamer for space and time efficient provisioning of virtual machines

Abstract

Platform and resource virtualization is evolving as an enabling technology to consolidate servers and to simplify the management of enterprise servers. Provisioning of Virtual Machines (VM) on demand is a key component of such environments. This paper presents Iceberg, a space and time efficient image streamer for provisioning VMs. Iceberg operates at block storage (image) level and is OS, Hypervisor, and file system agnostic. Iceberg is a chunk-based distributed image streamer which provides instant provisioning of VMs over the network. Iceberg utilizes a variablesize, content-based slicing algorithm such that the sharing among images is improved and storage space requirement is reduced significantly. We provide a comprehensive study of sharing among several different types of images and show up to 60% content sharing between two images. Much higher storage space saving can be achieved among a large number of similar images. © 2008 IEEE.