Speeding Up VM Image Distribution for Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

An efficient scheme of virtual machine image dissemination, which takes up a major portion of VM provisioning time, is key to ensuring that the service can be provisioned and delivered to clients in a timely manner. This paper presents a novel peer-to-peer protocol to efficiently distribute virtual machine images in a cloud data center. The primary idea of our proposal is to expedite the peer-to-peer content delivery by taking advantage of a high level of similarity that oftentimes exists among different VM images. The efficacy of our protocol is validated through an evaluation that demonstrates substantial performance gains over existing approaches.