Fast Booting Many Similar Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines have been commonly used for server consolidation in data centers, network classrooms, and cloud computing environments. Although booting up a virtual machine takes much less time than booting up a physical computer, booting up multiple virtual machines on a single physical server still takes a lot of time. We propose a method to speed up the booting process when a set of similar virtual machines share a snapshot enabled storage. Our method exploits massive memory page sharing stemming from the reads to common disk blocks by these virtual machines. Our experiments show that the second virtual machine may reduce the booting time by half.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000288112300008&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Computer Science, Information SystemsComputer Science, Theory & MethodsEICPCI-S(ISTP)