A buddy-file-system to improve block level sharing of disk images in virtualization environments

摘要

Most virtualization environments demand users to download complete disk images to create virtual machines. Due to this requirement a user has to spend a great deal of time downloading disk images from remote repositories. However, if we consider the system software and application software each user access in virtual machines, they are similar amongst most users, especially system data. Thus, there is a possibility for certain blocks at the disk level to be equal amongst the disk image and the hosting environment. For example if the disk image contains a Linux operating system and the hosting environment is also running Linux, at the disk level certain blocks can be similar. Latencies related to virtual machine access are partly due the unawareness of these common components. Our research is built upon this observation. We evaluate how existing problems in virtualization environments can be rectified by exploiting common data blocks.