LISA '07 – Abstract
Pp. 79–94 of the Proceedings
Stork: Package Management for Distributed VM Environments
Justin Cappos, Scott Baker, Jeremy Plichta, Duy Nyugen, Jason Hardies, Matt Borgard, Jeffry Johnston, and John H. Hartman, University of Arizona
Abstract
In virtual machine environments each application is often run in
its own virtual machine (VM), isolating it from other applications
running on the same physical machine. Contention for memory, disk
space, and network bandwidth among virtual machines, coupled with an
inability to share due to the isolation virtual machines provide,
leads to heavy resource utilization. Additionally, VMs increase
management overhead as each is essentially a separate system.
Stork is a package management tool for virtual machine
environments that is designed to alleviate these problems. Stork
securely and efficiently downloads packages to physical machines and
shares packages between VMs. Disk space and memory requirements are
reduced because shared files, such as libraries and binaries, require
only one persistent copy per physical machine. Experiments show that
Stork reduces the disk space required to install additional copies of
a package by over an order of magnitude, and memory by about 50%.
Stork downloads each package once per physical machine no matter how
many VMs install it. The transfer protocols used during download
improve elapsed time by 7X and reduce repository traffic by an order
of magnitude. Stork users can manage groups of VMs with the ease of
managing a single machine - even groups that consist of machines
distributed around the world. Stork is a real service that has run on
PlanetLab for over four years and has managed thousands of VMs.
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