Efficient Distribution of Virtual Machines for Cloud Computing

The commercial success of Cloud computing and recent developments in Grid computing have brought platform virtualization technology into the field of high performance computing. Virtualization offers both more flexibility and security through custom user images and user isolation. In this paper, we deal with the problem of distributing virtual machine (VM) images to a set of distributed compute nodes in a Cross-Cloud computing environment, i.e., the connection of two or more Cloud computing sites. Ambrust et al. identified data transfer bottlenecks as one of the obstacles Cloud computing has to solve to be a commercial success. Several methods for distributing VM images are presented, and optimizations based on copy on write layers are discussed. The performance of the presented solutions and the security overhead is evaluated.