VMtorrent: virtual appliances on-demand
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
VMTorrent: scalable P2P virtual machine streaming
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Scalable virtual machine deployment using VM image caches
SC '13 Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
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There are a number of benefits to using virtual machines in a training environment; however, when the total size of the images range from 5-40 GB, getting those images to the physical machines in a timely fashion can be a concern. In our environment, we have a single machine we can use as a server, and classrooms located on different subnets (in different cities). With this situation, a multicast solution isn't possible, and standard file transfer methods (e.g. over a common windows share) take 6-24 hours to complete. Given the existing limitations, we needed a faster method of deploying images to our client machines. Our solution centers on BitTorrent technology, a few additional freely available applications, and is glued together with a little scripting. With our solution in place, the 6-24 hour completion times have been reduced to 1-4 hours, and the deployment process takes less than 10 simple steps. The implementation is flexible enough that the server environment can be run from a Live CD if necessary, and similar implementations can easily be made platform independent. With the variety of tools that can be used to implement this environment, we also avoid the pitfalls of vendor lock-in.