Supporting Cloud Computing with the Virtual Block Store System

The fast development of cloud computing systems stimulates the needs for a standalone block storage system to provide persistent block storage services to virtual machines maintained by clouds. This paper presents the Virtual Block Store (VBS) System, a standalone block storage system built on the basis of LVM, iSCSI, and Xen hypervisor, which can provide basic block storage services such as volume creation and attachment. The concept and functional interface of VBS are based on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) service; moreover, VBS works independently with an existing LVM volume server and Xen nodes, and thus can be easily extended to support other types of volume servers and virtual machine managers, or integrated with various cloud computing systems. Preliminary I/O benchmark results are presented and analyzed, indicating that a VBS volume can provide throughput that is similar to an ATA over Ethernet virtual device.