VMStore: Distributed storage system for multiple virtual machines

Desktop virtualization is a very hot concept in both industry and academic communities. Since virtualized desktop system is based on multiple virtual machines (VM), it is necessary to design a distributed storage system to manage the VM images. In this paper, we design a distributed storage system, VMStore, by taking into account three important characteristics: high performance VM snapshot, booting optimization from multiple images and redundancy removal of images data. We adopt a direct index structure of blocks for VM snapshots to speed up VM booting performance significantly; provide a distribute storage structure with good bandwidth scalability by dynamically changing the number of storage nodes; and propose a data preprocessing strategy with intelligent object partitioning techniques, which would eliminate duplication more effectively. Performance analysis for VMStore focuses on two metrics: the speedup of VM booting and the overhead of de-duplication. Experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of VMStore.