Evaluation of Redundancy Driven Provisioning for Hypervisors with Locally Attached Storage

Virtualized data centers became ubiquitous and led to invention of new delivery model called cloud computing. Cloud service providers pursue high degree of automation for the management processes in order to make their services responsive and inexpensive. One of such critical processes is virtual machine provisioning. This article reports on our on-going research to evaluate the efficiency of the provisioning process that leverages virtual machine similarity to reduce the amount of data that has to be transferred from the storage server to the hyper visor on which the virtual machine is being instantiated. The simulation experiments point to conclusion that the redundancy based provisioning can provide very substantial reduction in terms of amount of data that needs to be copied from the storage server.