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VIRTUALIZATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING

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International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing

A Monthly Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology

ISSN 2320–088X

IJCSMC, Vol. 3, Issue. 5, May 2014, pg.1262 – 1273

RESEARCH ARTICLE

VIRTUALIZATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING

1
Deepanshu Thakral, 2Mahesh Singh
1
M. Tech Scholar, ACTM, Palwal, Faridabad.
2
Asst. Prof (CSE Department), ACTM, Palwal.
1
[email protected] 2 [email protected]

ABSTRACT
“Cloud Computing” is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data
access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and
configuration of the system that delivers the services. It implies a service oriented architecture,
reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of
ownership, on-demand services and many other things. This paper discusses the concept of “cloud”
computing, some of the issues it tries to address and related research topics.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, virtual computing lab, virtualization, utility computing

I. INTRODUCTION
“Cloud computing” is the next natural step in the evolution of on-demand information technology
services and products. To a large extent, cloud computing will be based on virtualized resources.
Cloud computing predecessors have been around for some time now, but the term became “popular”
some-time in October 2007 when IBM and Google announced collaboration in that domain. This was
followed by IBM‟s announcement of the “Blue Cloud” effort [9]. Since then, every-one is talking about
“Cloud Computing”. Of course, there also is the inevitable Wikipedia entry [3].

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This paper discusses the concept of “cloud” computing, some of the issues it tries to address, related
research topics. Section 2 discusses concepts and components of “cloud” computing. Section 3 discusses
“cloud”-related research and engineering challenges. Final section summarizes and concludes the paper.

II. CLOUD COMPUTING

A key differentiating element of a successful information technology (IT) is its ability to be-come a true,
valuable and economical contributor to cyber infrastructure [4]. “Cloud” computing embraces cyber
infrastructure, and builds upon decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, “grid
computing”, utility computing, and, more recently, networking, web and software services. It implies a
service-oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, greater flex-
ibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services and many other things.
A. Cyber Infrastructure
“Cyber infrastructure makes applications dramatically easier to develop and deploy, thus expanding the
feasible scope of applications possible within budget and organizational constraints, and shifting the
scientist‟s and engineer‟s effort away from information technology development and concentrating it on
scientific and engineering research. Cyber infrastructure also increases efficiency, quality, and
reliability by capturing commonalities among application needs, and facilitates the efficient sharing of
equipment and services.”[5]
Today, almost any business or major activity uses, or relies in some form, on IT and IT services. These
services need to be enabling and appliance-like, and there must be an economy of-scale for the total-
cost-of-ownership to be better than it would be without cyber infrastructure. Technology needs to
improve end-user productivity and reduce technology-driven overhead. For example, unless IT is the
primary business of an organization, less than 20% of its efforts not directly connected to its primary
business should have to do with IT overhead, even though 80% of its business might be con-ducted
using electronic means.

B. Concepts
A powerful underlying and enabling concept is computing through service-oriented architectures (SOA)
– delivery of an integrated and orchestrated suite of functions to an end-user through composition of
both loosely and tightly coupled functions, or services – often network-based. Related concepts are
component-based system engineering, orchestration of different services through workflows, and
virtualization.

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1. Service-oriented Architecture

Figure 1.1 Service – Oriented Architecture

SOA is not a new concept, although it again has been receiving considerable attention in recent years [9,
25, and 38]. Examples of some of the first network-based service-oriented architectures are remote
procedure calls (RPC), DCOM and Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA
specifications. A more recent example are the so called “Grid Computing” architectures and solutions.
In an SOA environment, end-users request an IT service (or an integrated collection of such services) at
the desired functional, quality and capacity level, and receive it either at the time requested or at a
specified later time. Service discovery, brokering, and reliability are important, and services are usually
designed to inter-operate, as are the composites made of these services. It is expected that in the next 10
years, service-based solutions will be a major vehicle for delivery of information and other IT-assisted
functions at both individual and organizational levels, e.g., software applications, web-based services,
personal and business “desktop” computing, high-performance computing [1].
2. Components
The key to a SOA framework that supports workflows is componentization of its services, an ability to
support a range of couplings among workflow building blocks, fault-tolerance in its data- and process-
aware service-based delivery, and an ability to audit processes, data and results, i.e., collect and use
provenance information.
Component-based approach is characterized by reusability (elements can be re-used in other workflows),
substitutability (alternative implementations are easy to insert, very precisely specified interfaces are
available, run-time component replacement mechanisms exist, there is ability to verify and validate
substitutions, etc.), extensibility and scalability (ability to readily extend system component pool and to

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scale it, increase capabilities of individual components, have an extensible and scalable architecture that
can automatically discover new functionalities and resources, etc.), customizability (ability to customize
generic features to the needs of a particular scientific domain and problem), and compos ability (easy
construction of more complex functional solutions using basic components, reasoning about such
compositions, etc.). There are other characteristics that also are very important. Those include reliability
and availability of the components and services, the cost of the services, security, total cost of ownership,
economy of scale, and so on.
In the context of cloud computing we distinguish many categories of components: from differentiated
and undifferentiated hardware, to general purpose and specialized software and applications, to real and
virtual “images”, to environments, to no-root differentiated resources, to workflow-based environments
and collections of services, and so on[1].

3. Workflows
An integrated view of service-based activities is provided by the concept of a workflow. An IT-Assisted
workflow represents a series of structured activities and computations that arise in information-assisted
problem solving. Work-flows have been drawing enormous attention in the database and information
systems research and development communities. Similarly, the scientific community has developed a
number of problem solving environments, most of them as integrated solutions [8]. Scientific workflows
merge advances in these two areas to automate support for sophisticated scientific problem solving.

A workflow can be represented by a directed graph of data flows that connect loosely and tightly
coupled (and often asynchronous) processing components. One such graph is shown in Figure 1. It
illustrates a Kepler-based implementation of a part of a fusion simulation workflow [2, 8].

In the context of “cloud computing”, the key questions should be whether the underlying infrastructure
is supportive of the workflow-oriented view of the world. This includes on-demand and advance-
reservation-based access to individual and aggregated computational and other resources, autonomics,
ability to group resources from potentially different “clouds” to deliver workflow results, appropriate
level of security and privacy, etc.

4. Virtualization
Virtualization is another very useful concept. It allows abstraction and isolation of lower level
functionalities and underlying hardware. This enables portability of higher level functions and sharing
and/or aggregation of the physical re-sources.

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The virtualization concept has been around in some form since 1960s (e.g., in IBM main-frame
systems). Since then, the concept has matured considerably and it has been applied to all aspects of
computing – memory, storage, processors, software, networks, as well as services that IT offers. It is the
combination of the growing needs and the recent advances in the IT architectures and solutions that is
now bringing the virtualization to the true commodity level. Virtualization, through its economy of scale,
and its ability to offer very advanced and complex IT services at a reasonable cost, is poised to become,
along with wireless and highly distributed and pervasive computing de-vices, such as sensors and
personal cell-based access devices, the driving technology behind the next waive in IT growth [11].
Not surprisingly, there are dozens of virtualization products, and a number of small and large companies
that make them. Some examples in the operating systems and software applications space are VMware1,
Xen – an open source

Figure 1. A Kepler-based workflow.

Linux-based product developed by XenSource2, and Microsoft virtualization products3, to mention a
few. Major IT players have also shown a renewed interest in the technology (e.g., IBM, Hewllet-
Packard, Intel, Sun, RedHat). Classical storage players such as EMC, NetApp, IBM and Hitachi have
not been standing still either. In addition, the network virtualization market is teeming with activity.
C. Users
The most important Cloud entity, and the principal quality driver and constraining influence is, of
course, the user.
The value of a solution depends very much on the view it has of its end-user requirements and user
categories.

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Figu re 2 . Clo ud user hierarchy.

Figure 2 illustrates four broad sets of non-exclusive user categories: System or cyber infrastructure (CI)
developers; developers (authors) of different component services and underlying applications;
technology and domain personnel who integrate basic services into composite services and their
orchestrations (work-flows) and delivers those to end-users; and, finally, users of simple and composite
services. User categories also include domain specific groups, and indirect users such as stakeholders,
policy makers, and so on. Functional and usability requirements derive, in most part, directly from the
user profiles. An example, and a discussion, of user categories appropriate in the educational domain
can be found in [10].
Specifically, a successful “cloud” in that do-main – the K-20 and continuing education – would be
expected to:
 Support large numbers of users that range from very naive to very sophisticated (mil-lions of student
contact hours per year).
 Support construction and delivery of content and curricula for these users. For that, the system needs
to provide support and tools for thousands of instructors, teachers, professors, and others that serve
the students.
 Generate adequate content diversity, quality, and range. This may require many hundreds of authors.
 Be reliable and cost-effective to operate and maintain. The effort to maintain the system should be
relatively small, although introduction of new paradigms and solutions may require a considerable
start-up development effort [1].
1. Developers
Cyber infrastructure developers who are responsible for development and maintenance of the Cloud
framework develop and integrate system hardware, storage, networks, interfaces, administration and
management software, communications and scheduling algorithms, services authoring tools, workflow
generation and resource access algorithms and software, and so on. They must be experts in specialized
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areas such as networks, computational hardware, storage, low level middleware, operating systems
imaging, and similar. In addition to innovation and development of new “cloud” functionalities, they
also are responsible for keeping the complexity of the framework away from the higher level users through
judicious abstraction, layering and middleware. One of the lessons learned from, for example, “grid”
computing efforts is that the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and middleware can be daunting,
and, if exposed, can impact wider adoption of a solution [12].
2. Authors

Service authors are developers of individual base-line “images” and services that may be used directly,
or may be integrated into more complex service aggregates and workflows by service provisioning and
integration experts. In the context of the VCL technology, an “image” is a tangible abstraction of the
software stack [6]. It incorporates
 any base-line operating system, and if virtualization is needed for scalability, a hypervisor layer,
 any desired middleware or application that runs on that operating system, and
 any end-user access solution that is appropriate (e.g., ssh, web, RDP, VNC, etc.).
Images can be loaded on “bare-metal”, or into an operating system/application virtual environment of
choice. When a user has the right to create an image, that user usually starts with a “NoApp” or a base-
line image (e.g., Win XP or Linux) without any except most basic applications that come with the
operating system, and extends it with his/her applications. Similarly, when an author constructs
composite images (aggregates of two or more images we call environments that are loaded
synchronously), the user extends service capabilities of VCL. An author can program an image for sole
use on one or more hardware units, if that is desired, or for sharing of the resources with other users.
Scalability is achieved through a combination of multi-user service hosting, application virtualization, and
both time and CPU multiplexing and load balancing. Authors must be component (base-line image and
applications) experts and must have good understanding of the needs of the user categories above them in
the Figure 2 triangle. Some of the functionalities a cloud framework must provide for them are image
creation tools, image and service management tools, service brokers, service registration and discovery
tools, security tools, provenance collection tools, cloud component aggregations tools, resource mapping
tools, license management tools, fault-tolerance and fail-over mechanisms, and so on [11].
It is important to note that the authors, for the most part, will not be cloud framework experts, and thus
the authoring tools and interfaces must be appliances: easy-to-learn and easy-to-use and they must allow
the authors to concentrate on the “image” and service development rather than struggle with the cloud
infrastructure intricacies.

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3. Service Composition
Similarly, services integration and provisioning experts should be able to focus on creation of composite
and orchestrated solutions needed for an end-user. They sample and combine existing services and
images, customize them, up-date existing services and images, and develop new composites. They may
also be the front for delivery of these new services (e.g., an instructor in an educational institution, with
“images” being cloud-based in-lab virtual desktops), they may oversee the usage of the services, and may
collect and manage service usage information, statistics, etc. This may require some expertise in the
construction of images and services, but, for the most part, their work will focus on interfacing with end-
users and on provisioning of what end-users need in their workflows.

Their expertise may range from workflow automation through a variety of tools and languages, to
domain expertise needed to under-stand what aggregates of services, if any, the end-user needs, to
management of end-user ac-counting needs, and to worrying about inter-, intra- and extra-cloud service
orchestration and engagement, to provenance data analysis.

Some of the components that integration and provisioning expert may need are illustrated in Figure 3,
based on the VCL implementation [6]. The need may range from “bare metal” loaded images, images
on virtual plat-forms (on hypervisors), to collections of image aggregates (environments, including
high-performance computing clusters), images with some restrictions, and workflow-based services. A
service management node may use resources that can be reloaded at will to differentiate them with
images of choice. After they have been used, these resources are returned to an undifferentiated state for
re-use. In an educational con text, this could be, for example, a VMWare image of 10 lab-class desktops
that may be needed between 2 and 3 pm on Monday. Then after 3pm another set of images can be
loaded into those resources[1].
On the other hand, an “Environment” could be a collection of images loaded on one or more plat-forms.
For example, web server, database server, visualization application server, or a high-performance cluster.
Workflow image is typically a process control image that also has a temporal component. It can launch
any number of the previous resources as needed and then manage their use and release based on an
automated workflow.

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Figu re 3. S o m e V C L c l o u d c o m p o n e n t s .
Users of images that load onto undifferentiated resources can be given root or administrative access
rights since those resources are “wiped clean” after their use. On the other hand, re-sources that provide
access to only some of its virtual partitions, may allow non-root cloud users only: for example, a z-Series
mainframe may offer one of its LPARS as a resource. Similarly an ESX-loaded platform may be non-root
access, while its guest operating system images may be of root-access type.
4. End-users
End-users of services are the most important users. They require appropriately reliable and timely
service delivery, easy-to-use interfaces, collaborative support, information about their services, etc. The
distribution of services, across the network and across resources, will depend on the task complexity,
desired schedules and resource constraints. Solutions should not rule out use of any network type (wire,
optical, wireless) or access mode (high speed and low speed). However, VCL has set a lower bound on the
end-to-end connectivity throughput, roughly at the level of DSL and cable modem speeds. At any point in
time, users‟ work must be secure and protected from data losses and unauthorized access.

Figu re 4 . V C L “s eat s” .
For example, the resource needs of educational end-users (Figure 4) may range from single-seat
desktops (“computer images”) that may deliver any operating system and application appropriate to the
educational domain, to a group of lab or classroom seats for support of synchronous or asynchronous
learning or hands-on sessions, one or more servers supporting different educational functions, groups of
coupled servers (or environments), e.g., an Apache server, a database server, and a workflow man-

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agement server all working together to sup-port a particular class, or research clusters, and high-
performance computing clusters. Figure 4 shows the current basic services (resources) de-livered by
VCL. The duration of resource ownership by the end-users may range from a few hours, to several
weeks, a semester, or an open-ended period of time.

III. RESEARCH ISSUES

The general cloud computing approach discussed so far, as well as the specific VCL implementation of
a cloud continues a number of research directions, and opens some new ones. For example, economy-of-
scale and economics of image and service construction depends to a large extent on the ease of
construction and mobility of these images, not only within a cloud, but also among different clouds. Of
special interest is construction of complex environments of resources and complex control images for
those resources, including workflow-oriented images. Temporal and spatial feedback large scale
workflows may present is a valid research issue. Underlying that is a considerable amount of meta-data,
some permanently attached to an image, some dynamically attached to an image, some kept in the cloud
management databases [1].
Cloud provenance data, and in general metadata management, is an open issue. The classification we
use divides provenance information into
 Cloud Process provenance – dynamics of control flows and their progression, execution
information, code performance tracking, etc.
 Cloud Data provenance – dynamics of data and data flows, file locations, application input/
output information, etc.
 System (or Environment) provenance – system information, O/S, compiler versions, loaded
libraries, environment variables, etc.
Open challenges include: How to collect provenance information in a standardized and seamless way
and with minimal overhead –modularized design and integrated provenance recording; How to store this
information in a permanent way so that one can come back to it at anytime, – standardized schema; and
How to present this information to the user in a logical manner – an intuitive user web interface:
Dashboard [6].
Some other image- and service-related practical issues involve finding optimal image and service
composites and optimization of image and environment loading times.
There is also an issue of the image portability and by implication of the image format. Given the
proliferation of different virtualization environments and the variety in the hardware, standardization of

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image formats is of considerable interest. Some open solutions exist or are under consideration, and a
number of more proprietary solutions are available already [13]. For example, VCL currently uses
standard image snapshots [14] that may be an operating system, hypervisor and platform specific, and
thus exchange of images requires relatively complex mapping and additional storage.
Another research and engineering challenge is security. For end-users to feel comfortable with a
“cloud” solution that holds their software, data and processes, there should exist considerable assurances
that services are highly reliable and available, as well as secure and safe, and that privacy is protected.
This raises the issues of end-to-end service isolation through VPN and SSH tunnels and VLANs, and the
guarantees one may have that the data and the images keep their integrity in the “cloud”. Some of the
work being done by the NC State Secure Open Systems Initiative [37] involves watermarking of the
images and data to ensure verifiable integrity. While NC State experience with VCL is excellent and our
security solution has been holding up beautifully over the last four years, security tends to be a moving
target and a lot of challenges remain.

IV.CONCLUSIONS
“Cloud” computing builds on decades of re-search in virtualization, distributed computing, utility
computing, and, more recently, networking, web and software services. It implies a service-oriented
architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total
cost of ownership, on- demand services and many other things. This [6] paper discusses the concept of
“cloud” computing, the issues it tries to address, related research topics, and a “cloud” implementation
based on VCL technology. Our experience with VCL technology is excellent and we are working on
additional functionalities and features that will [7] make it even more suitable for cloud framework
construction.

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