FVD: a High-Performance Virtual Machine Image Format for Cloud Chunqiang Tang IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
[email protected] http://www.research.ibm.com/people/c/ctang/ Note: This paper describes the copy-on-write, copy- 1 Introduction on-read, and adaptive prefetching capabilities of FVD. The compact image capability of FVD is described Cloud Computing is widely considered as the next big separately in a companion paper entitled “Compact thing in IT evolution. In a Cloud like Amazon EC2 [1], Image Support in Fast Virtual Disk (FVD)”, which the storage space for virtual machines’ virtual disks can is available at https://researcher.ibm.com/ be allocated from multiple sources: the host’s direct- researcher/view project.php?id=1852 attached storage (DAS, i.e., local disk), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area network (SAN). These op- Abstract tions offer different performance, reliability, and avail- ability at different prices. DAS is at least several times This paper analyzes the gap between existing hyper- cheaper than NAS and SAN, but DAS limits the avail- visors’ virtual disk capabilities and the requirements in ability and mobility of VMs. a Cloud, and proposes a solution called FVD (Fast Vir- tual Disk). FVD consists of an image format and a To get the best out of the different technologies, a block device driver designed for QEMU. Despite the ex- Cloud usually offers a combination of block-device stor- istence of many popular virtual machine (VM) image age services to VMs. For instance, Amazon Web Ser- formats, FVD came out of our unsatisfied needs in the vices (AWS) [2] offers to a VM both ephemeral storage IBM Cloud.