Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
First Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems — Abstract

Global-scale Service Deployment in the XenoServer Platform

Evangelos Kotsovinos, Tim Moreton, Ian Pratt, Russ Ross, Keir Fraser, and Steven Hand, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory; Tim Harris, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

Abstract

We are building the XenoServer platform for global computing, a public infrastructure capable of safely hosting untrusted distributed services on behalf of uncooperative paying clients. Service components execute on one or more XenoServers within resource-managed Virtual Machines (VMs) which provide resource isolation, protection, and allow the execution of arbitrary applications and services.

To assist the deployment of services on the platform, we provide an effective solution that allows users to fully customize the VMs to be launched by specifying the operating system kernel image and distribution le-system to be used. Moreover, we have implemented mechanisms for facilitating easy and ef cient distribution of those kernel and lesystem images; users build their VMs' con gurations once and use the platform to ef ciently launch VMs on large numbers of machines around the world.

Initial experiences with our deployment infrastructure demonstrate that the platform provides a practical substrate for public global computing; we show how a complex service running on the user's own customized Linux environment can be deployed to multiple XenoServers around the world in under 45 seconds.

  • View the full text of this paper in PDF.
  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 1 Dec. 2004 ch
Technical Program
WORLDS '04 Home
USENIX home