VMPlants: Providing and Managing Virtual Machine Execution Environments for Grid Computing
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
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
Detours: binary interception of Win32 functions
WINSYM'99 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Windows NT Symposium - Volume 3
Automatic Service Deployment Using Virtualisation
PDP '08 Proceedings of the 16th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2008)
Portable desktop applications based on P2P transportation and virtualization
LISA'08 Proceedings of the 22nd conference on Large installation system administration conference
Future Generation Computer Systems
Virtual appliance content distribution for a global infrastructure cloud service
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
From infrastructure delivery to service management in clouds
Future Generation Computer Systems
Experiences with content addressable storage and virtual disks
WIOV'08 Proceedings of the First conference on I/O virtualization
An approach for virtual appliance distribution for service deployment
Future Generation Computer Systems
Converting Legacy Desktop Applications into On-Demand Personalized Software
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
Pragmatic assessment of research intensive areas in cloud: a systematic review
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Leveraging collaborative content exchange for on-demand VM multi-deployments in iaas clouds
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
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Cloud Computing offers a flexible and relatively cheap solution to deploy IT infrastructure in an elastic way. An emerging cloud service allows customers to order virtual machines to be delivered virtually in the cloud; and in most cases, besides the virtual hardware and system software, it is necessary to deploy application software in a similar way to provide a fully-functional work environment. Most existing systems use virtual appliances to provide this function, which couples application software with virtual machine (VM) image(s) closely. This paper proposes a new method based on the user-level virtualization technology to decouple application software from VM to improve the deployment flexibility. User-level virtualization isolates applications from the OS (and then the lower-level VM); so that a user can choose which software will be used after setting the virtual machines' configuration. Moreover, the chosen software is not pre-installed (or pre-stored) in the VM image; instead, it can be streamed from the application depository on demand when the user launches it in a running VM to save the storage overhead. During the whole process, no software installation is needed. Further, the enormous existing desktop software can be converted into such on-demand versions without any modification of source code. We present the whole framework, including the application preparation, the runtime system design, the detailed deployment and usage workflow, and some optimizations. At last, test results show that this solution can be efficient in performance and storage.