DVCE: The Virtual Computing Environment Supported by Distributed VM Images

Compared to the conventional physical cluster, the virtual cluster technology has features such as flexible configuration, easy management and high system security, which provides users with an easily customized computing environment. Virtual machine image files as the most important stored objects in the virtual computing environment include all the information about the whole life cycle of virtual machine. The storage of the virtual machine images is an important part of virtual computing. There are mainly two ways to store the images, which include local storage and networking storage. This paper proposes a mechanism to manage the distributed image files to support the virtual computing environment. It uses the computing nodes` local storage as a chunk server in a distributed file system, and regards the distribution of the image files as a primary factor to choose the computing node to deploy virtual machine and to implement a backup mechanism of distributed images based on historical records of image files. Functional test and performance test results show that it can effectively support the virtual computing environment and has great values of applications and research.