A low-bandwidth network file system
SOSP '01 Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Venti: A New Approach to Archival Storage
FAST '02 Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies
Planned Extensions to the Linux Ext2/Ext3 Filesystem
Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Virtual Appliances for Deploying and Maintaining Software
LISA '03 Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration
PDS: a virtual execution environment for software deployment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
The collective: a cache-based system management architecture
NSDI'05 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2
Virtualization aware file systems: getting beyond the limitations of virtual disks
NSDI'06 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 3
Purely functional system configuration management
HOTOS'07 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems
Supporting practical content-addressable caching with CZIP compression
ATC'07 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference on Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Managing security of virtual machine images in a cloud environment
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security
Constructing and managing appliances for cloud deployments from repositories of reusable components
HotCloud'09 Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Hot topics in cloud computing
Experiences with content addressable storage and virtual disks
WIOV'08 Proceedings of the First conference on I/O virtualization
Always up-to-date: scalable offline patching of VM images in a compute cloud
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
RC2-a living lab for cloud computing
LISA'10 Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Large installation system administration
Going back and forth: efficient multideployment and multisnapshotting on clouds
Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
VMFlock: virtual machine co-migration for the cloud
Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
On the benefits of transparent compression for cost-effective cloud data storage
Transactions on large-scale data- and knowledge-centered systems III
AmazonIA: when elasticity snaps back
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Proceedings of 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
An empirical analysis of similarity in virtual machine images
Proceedings of the Middleware 2011 Industry Track Workshop
Privacy-sensitive VM retrospection
HotCloud'11 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Hot topics in cloud computing
Virtual machine images as structured data: the mirage image library
HotCloud'11 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Hot topics in cloud computing
Improving virtual appliance management through virtual layered file systems
LISA'11 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Large Installation System Administration
Efficient storage of virtual machine images
Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing Date
GPFS-SNC: an enterprise storage framework for virtual-machine clouds
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Testing large-scale cloud management
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on Information, computer and communications security
BlobCR: Virtual disk based checkpoint-restart for HPC applications on IaaS clouds
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Improving I/O performance using virtual disk introspection
HotStorage'13 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX conference on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems
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Virtual-machine images are currently distributed as disk-image files, which are files that mirror the content of physical disks. This format is convenient for the virtual machine monitors that execute these images. However, it is not well-suited for administering images because storing images as disk-image files forces administrators to maintain the software on images with the same tools that they use to maintain the software on physical machines. Already, these tools cannot cope with "physical server sprawl"; in the future, because images can be snapshotted and cloned easily, enterprises that migrate from physical machines to images will need tools that scale to cope with the larger problem of "virtual-machine image sprawl. To address this problem, this paper proposes the Mirage image format (MIF), a new storage format that exposes the rich semantic information currently buried in disk-image files. Disk-image files contain a mapping from file name to file content (and file metadata). MIF decouples this mapping into a manifest that maps file names to content descriptors (and file metadata) and a store that holds the content. Each image has its own manifest and a store may contain content for many images. As with disk-image files, images in MIF fully encapsulate application state including all software dependences. In addition, conversion between MIF and traditional disk-image formats is easy. This paper shows, through examples, that MIF makes some typical software management tasks--inventory control, customized deployment, and image update--faster and easier. The general technique is to operate on manifests instead of on content whenever possible. These tasks can be performed without starting images and, because manifests are simpler and orders of magnitude smaller than disk-image files, without accessing large amounts of data.