Operating Systems and Virtualization Frameworks: From Local to Distributed Similarities

Virtualization technologies radically changed the way in which distributed architectures are exploited. With the contribution of VM capabilities and with the emergence of IaaS platforms, more and more frameworks tend to manage VMs across distributed architectures like operating systems handle processes on a single node. Taking into account that most of these frameworks follow a centralized model -- where roughly one node is in charge of the management of VMs -- and considering the growing size of infrastructures in terms of nodes and VMs, new proposals relying on more autonomic and decentralized approaches should be submitted. Designing and implementing such models is a tedious and complex task. However, as well as research studies on OSes and hyper visors are complementary at the node level, we advocate that virtualization frameworks can benefit from lessons learnt from distributed operating system proposals. In this article, we motivate such a position by analyzing similarities between OSes and virtualization frameworks. More precisely, we focus on the management of processes and VMs, first at the node level and then on a cluster scale. From our point of view, such investigations can guide the community to design and implement new proposals in a more autonomic and distributed way.