Parallax: virtual disks for virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • Dutch T. Meyer;Gitika Aggarwal;Brendan Cully;Geoffrey Lefebvre;Michael J. Feeley;Norman C. Hutchinson;Andrew Warfield

  • Affiliations:

  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Parallax is a distributed storage system that uses virtualization to provide storage facilities specifically for virtual environments. The system employs a novel architecture in which storage features that have traditionally been implemented directly on high-end storage arrays and switches are relocated into a federation of storage VMs, sharing the same physical hosts as the VMs that they serve. This architecture retains the single administrative domain and OS agnosticism achieved by array- and switch-based approaches, while lowering the bar on hardware requirements and facilitating the development of new features. Parallax offers a comprehensive set of storage features including frequent, low-overhead snapshot of virtual disks, the 'gold-mastering' of template images, and the ability to use local disks as a persistent cache to dampen burst demand on networked storage.