Hemera:SC:Virtualization

Large Scale Management of Virtual Machines (Virtualization)

Leader: Adrien Lèbre (ASCOLA)

Live-migration of virtual machines is one of the key-point of virtualization technologies. Besides simplifying maintenance operations, it provides an undeniable advantage to implement fine-grained scheduling policies such as consolidation or load-balancing strategies.

However, manipulating VMs throughout a large-scale and highly-distributed infrastructure as easy as traditional OSes handle processes on local nodes is still facing several issues. Among the major ones, we can notice the implementation of suited mechanisms to efficiently schedule VMs and to insure the access to the VM images through different locations. Such mechanisms should assume to be able to control,monitor and communicate with both the host OSes and the guest instances spread across the infrastructure at any time. If several works have addressed these concerns, the real experiments are in most cases limited to few nodes and there is a clear need to study such concerns at higher scales.

The goal of this challenge is to introduce techniques to deploy a large amount of virtual machines over the Grid'5000 platform. Once deployed, these instances can then be used at the user convenience.

The result of that work opens doors to the manipulation of virtual machines thoughout a distributed infrastructure and the investigation of particular concerns such as the impact of migrating a large amount of VMs simultaneously or the study of new proposals dealing with VM images management.