Transparent network services via a virtual traffic layer for virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • John R. Lange;Peter A. Dinda

  • Affiliations:

  • Northwestern University;Northwestern University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We claim that network services can be transparently added to existing unmodified applications running inside virtual machine environments. Examples of these network services include protocol transformations (e.g. TCP to UDT), network connection persistence during long duration unavailability (e.g. wide area VM migration), and network flow modification (e.g. local acknowledgments and Split-TCP). To demonstrate the utility of this concept, and to enable the practical implementations of these examples and others, we have developed VTL. VTL is a framework for packet modification and creation whose purpose is to modify network traffic to and from a VM, doing so transparently to the VM and its applications. We explain how to use VTL to implement the examples mentioned above and others, such as providing anonymized connectivity for a virtual machine through the Tor anonymizing network, and creating cooperative selective wormholing services for network intrusion detection systems.