laforge-slides/2005/flow-accounting-ols2005/OLS2005/vasilevsky/vasilevsky-abstract.tex

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% Registration Linux Virtualization on Virtual Iron VFe
% [2]Register/Submit Proposal Alex Vasilevsky (alex@virtualiron.com)
After many years of research and development,
the concept of cluster-based computing
seamlessly integrating a set of computing
resources into a cohesive whole has gone
largely unfulfilled. The barrier to adoption
of cluster-based computing has been that
applications must be made cluster-aware. The
best technology that is currently available is
a set of middleware tools, such as the Globus
toolkit, which is used to rework applications
to run on a cluster. Because it is difficult
to make applications run in parallel on a
cluster, only a handful of highly specialized
applications sometimes referred to as
``embarrassingly parallel'' applications, have
been made cluster-aware. Of the very few
commercial cluster-aware applications, the
best known is Oracle Database Real Application
Clustering. Virtual Iron(R) Software has
solved these problems by creating Virtual Iron
VFe, which allows any applications to
transparently run on a tightly-coupled
cluster of computers without any
modifications. This software elegantly
abstracts the underlying cluster of servers
with a Distributed Virtual Machine Monitor.
Like many other Virtual Machines Monitors,
this software layer takes complete control of
the underlying hardware and creates virtual
machines, each of which behaves like a
complete physical machine running its own
operating system in full isolation. In
contrast to other existing Virtual Machines
Monitors, the Distributed Virtual Machine
Monitor creates a virtual multi-processor on a
collection of tightly coupled servers. The
system gives guest operating systems the
illusion that it is running on a single
multi-processor machine with \textit{N} CPUs on top
of \textit{M} physical servers interconnected by
networks. In this paper we'll describe Linux
Virtualization on Virtual Iron VFe, the
virtualization capabilities of the Virtual
Iron(R) Distributed VMM technology, as well as
the changed made to the Linux kernel to take
advantage of this new distributed
virtualization technology.