VM memory in the Cloud: Watch what Kevin has to say
By Tarry Singh at 14 March, 2009, 5:08 am
My friend, Kevin, in working on filing a patent on this very cool aspect around memory motion that will definitely affect the InterCloud and MetaCloud models as more “Handlers” and “Negotiators” will come into place in the reference architecture for multi-service providers to work together in order to provide HA/FT for services.
Read on…
When VM migration came onto the scene, it unlocked a wealth of additional value of virtualization, and a set of higher-level technologies. In VMware terminology, DRS tapped VM migration to do load balancing within a cluster of machines. DPM uses migration to pack VMs into lesser number of machines, de-powering ones not needed, thus doing cluster-wide power management. I call this whole suite of dynamic VM technologies, virtualization 2.0. Unfortunately, these dynamic features have generally been confined to within a physical site location, or at best within a Campus Area Network.
To get to where virtualization needs to go, we need to be able to look at virtualization as a fabric, stretching or overlaying numerous physical sites. And Cloud Computing will absolutely exacerbate this need. Many things that we’ve contemplated on a small scale (e.g. load balancing, power management, down-time maintenance), need to be brought to a larger context of a virtualization fabric stretching across physical sites. Virtualization needs to stretch to the cloud. To be sure, there are a number of issues to solve to make this happen, including networking and storage continuity. But I’d like to present a part of this next evolutionary step, virtualization 3.0, which is critical to its success yet unanswered elsewhere to my knowledge.
Memory density in servers continues to go up following its own exponential path. And as virtualization is used for increasingly higher-end workloads, the size of per-VM memory will continue to rise. Just imagine if you piled up all the RAM from all of your data centers, in one spot! Yet, to enable a fluid and dynamic virtualization 3.0 fabric, we need to rapidly allow all kinds of intra and inter-site VM migrations to occur, often driven automatically. That requires a whole new approach to how we manage VM memory; huge volumes of it effectively need to be transported rapidly. On the storage front, there are a number of technologies afoot, which are enablers of virtualization 3.0. But, I’ve been working for some time on concepts for making VM memory a 1st class citizen of the virtualization 3.0 vision.
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