Peer-to-peer virtualized services

Abstract

This paper describes the design and operation of a peer-to-peer framework for providing, locating and consuming distributed services that are encapsulated within virtual machines. We believe that the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer networks acting in tandem with techniques such as live virtual machine migration and replication facilitate scalable and on-demand provision of services. Furthermore, the use of virtual machines eases the deployment of a wide range of legacy systems that may subsequently be exposed through the framework. To illustrate the feasibility of running distributed services within virtual machines, several computa- tional benchmarks are executed on a compute cluster running our framework, and their performance characteristics are evaluated. While I/O-intensive benchmarks suffer a penalty due to virtualization-related limitations in the prevailing I/O architecture, the performance of processor-bound benchmarks is virtually unaffected. Thus, the combination of peer-to-peer technology and virtualization merits serious consideration as a scalable and ubiquitous basis for distributed services. A view of some challenges and opportunities that emerge in the design of such frameworks is also offered.