Implementation of cloud Computing node fast deploy batch virtual machine instance on KVM platform

Cloudstack is an open-source, highly available and scalable cloud computing platform that supports the management of most mainstream virtual machine managers, such as KVM and XEN. There are two types of storage in Cloudstack: Primary storage provides disk volumes for virtual machine instances, and level two storage provides templates for virtual machine instances to install mirrored files for systems and disk snapshots of virtual machine instances. Both types of storage support network-attached storage (NAS).

Figure 0. Cloudstack Architecture

In this article we will take a Linux host as an example, on which the KVM is run as a compute node. Also, SONAS creates a network shared file system (NFS) for this compute node to store a mirrored template for the virtual machine system and virtual disks for the bulk virtual machine instance, which enables increased storage efficiency and the deployment of virtual machine instances. The virtual machine examples involved in this article are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard two types.

Introduction to the IBM GPFS file cloning feature

GPFS (General Parallel file System), a common parallel filesystem. It is a high-performance, disk-shared cluster parallel file system, in which all nodes in the cluster can access the entire file system in parallel.

File clones are somewhat similar to file copies, unlike file clones that are faster than file copies and have higher utilization of storage space. The clone file itself is similar to a writable file snapshot, and only the changed data will actually start to occupy disk space. So we can improve the storage efficiency of virtual machine instances by cloning the virtual machine's system generic template and configuring the clone file as virtual disk for the virtual machine instance. In this way, in the cloud computing environment, the deployment of bulk virtual machines can save a huge amount of storage space.

To view an existing file on the GPFS file system:

[root@99m4912.mgmt001st001 linux]# ls-al basic.img-rwx------1 root 10737418240 03:53 root@99m4912.mgmt001st001 linux]# du-lh basic.img10g basic.img

To create a basic.img file clone using a command:

[root@99m4912.mgmt001st001 linux]# mkclone-s/ibm/frank/image/linux/basic.img \-t/ibm/frank/image/linux/ Basicclone1efssg1046i The Clone file Super-delegates been successfully created. Efssg1000i the command completed successfully.

Now to see the size of its cloned file:

[root@99m4912.mgmt001st001 linux]# ls-al basic*-rwx------1 root 10737418240 June 04:05 basicclone1-rwx------2 Root root 10737418240 03:53 basic.img[root@99m4912.mgmt001st001 linux]# du-sh basic*0 basicclone110g Basic.img

We note that after a file clone is created for a 10G file, its initial footprint is zero.

Next, we use the GPFS-based SONAS storage system to provide storage space for the compute node KVM platform, while using the SONAS file cloning feature to quickly copy the virtual machine instance's disk image files.