Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom and Hakim Weatherspoon
ACM EuroSys
Bern, Switzerland, April 2012
Abstract. Current Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds operate in
isolation from each other. Slight variations in the
virtual machine (VM) abstractions or underlying
hypervisor services prevent unified access and
control across clouds. While standardization efforts
aim to address these issues, they will take years to
be agreed upon and adopted, if ever. Instead of
standardization, which is by definition
provider-centric, we advocate a user-centric
approach that gives users an unprecedented level of
control over the virtualization layer. We introduce
theXen-Blanket, a thin, immediately deployable
virtualization layer that can homogenize today’s
diverse cloud infrastructures. We have deployed the
Xen-Blanket across Amazon’s EC2, an enterprise
cloud, and a private setup at Cornell University. We
show that a user-centric approach to homogenize
clouds can achieve similar performance to a
paravirtualized environment while enabling
previously impossible tasks like cross-provider live
migration. The XenBlanket also allows users to
exploit resource management opportunities like
oversubscription, and ultimately can reduce costs
for users.
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-EuroSys-12,
author = {Dan and Williams and Hani and Jamjoom and Hakim and Weatherspoon},
title = {{The Xen-Blanket: Virtualize Once, Run Everywhere}},
booktitle = {ACM EuroSys},
address = {Bern, Switzerland},
month = {April},
year = {2012}
}