DNS Records Secure Provisioning Mechanism for Virtual Machines automatic management in high density data centers

摘要

Nowadays is becoming trivial to have multiple virtual machines working in parallel on hardware platforms with high processing power. This appropriate cost effective approach can be found at Internet Service Providers, in cloud service providers’ environments, in research and development lab testing environment (for example Universities’ student’s lab), in virtual application for security evaluation and in many other places. In the aforementioned cases, it is often necessary to start and/or stop virtual machines on the fly. In cloud service providers all the creation / tear down actions are triggered by a customer request and cannot be postponed or delayed for later evaluation. When a new virtual machine is created, it is imperative to assign unique IP addresses to all network interfaces and also domain name system DNS records that contain text based data, IP addresses, etc. Even worse, if a virtual machine has to be stopped or torn down, the critical network resources such as IP addresses and DNS records have to be carefully controlled in order to avoid IP addresses conflicts and name resolution problems between an old virtual machine and a newly created virtual machine. This paper proposes a provisioning mechanism to avoid both DNS records and IP addresses conflicts due to human misconfiguration, problems that can cause networking operation service disruptions.