On the Evaluation of VM Provisioning Time in Cloud Platforms for Mission-Critical Infrastructures

Cloud Computing has risen a great interest over the last years as it represents an enabling technology for flexible and ubiquitous access over the network to a set of shared computing resources. This work comes from an industrial experience aiming at exploiting the cloud potential for virtualizing complex infrastructures such as an entire Air Traffic Center (ATC), a clear example of complex SoS (System of Systems). The use of virtualization is convenient because industry can leverage in-house test-beds to perform distributed testing campaigns in pre-operational phases or to design new automatic fail-over mechanisms for fully distributed systems. In order to realize such mitigation and recovery techniques in the ATC field, indeed, a cloud platform is required to guarantee a low VM provisioning time with the objective of minimizing the service disruption. In this perspective, after having introduced the principal concepts and factors of the provisioning time, we propose a deep analysis and comparison for two different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms, namely Open Stack and Open Nebula (using KVM as hypervisor), that were selected through a preliminary scouting phase.