Title: Management of virtual machine images in heterogeneous clouds

Authors: João Pereira; Paula Prata

Addresses: Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Department of Informatics, University of Beira Interior, Rua Marquês d'Ávila e Bolama, 6201-001 Covilhã, Portugal ' Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Department of Informatics, University of Beira Interior, Rua Marquês d'Ávila e Bolama, 6201-001 Covilhã, Portugal

Abstract: This paper presents the image server of the VISOR cloud agnostic virtual machine images management service. An evaluation approach is also described and the results are discussed. VISOR is not intended to fit in a specific cloud framework but rather to overreach sharing and interoperability limitations among different frameworks. Such feature is achieved by relying on a flexible image metadata schema and in a storage abstraction layer, where the latter seamlessly abstracts the heterogeneity of distinct cloud storage systems into which images can be saved. VISOR is an open source highly distributed system composed of several independent web services. In its development we have focused in modularity, extensibility and performance. Conducted evaluation tests have shown encouraging results regarding performance and scalability.

Keywords: cloud computing; virtual machine images; event-driven programming; web services; representational state transfer; REST; storage systems; image management; heterogeneous clouds; image metadata; storage abstraction; open source; modularity; extensibility.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.067062

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.10 No.1/2, pp.113 - 129

Received: 20 Jul 2012
Accepted: 04 Mar 2013
Published online: 25 Jan 2015 *

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