Parallax : volume management for virtual machines

• Main Author: Meyer, Dutch Thomassen
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: Storage management; Virtual machines; Snapshots
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/2612

Parallax is a distributed storage system that uses virtualization to provide storage facilities specifically for virtual environments. The system employs a novel archi-tecture 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.