PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Agentless Cloud-wide Streaming of Guest File System Updates

The Second IEEE Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E'14), March 2014..

Wolfgang Richter, Canturk Isci*, Jan Harkes, Benjamin Gilbert, Vasanth Bala*, Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Carnegie Mellon University
*IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

We propose a non-intrusive approach for monitoring virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. At the core of this approach is a mechanism for selective real-time monitoring of guest file updates within VM instances. This mechanism is agentless, requiring no guest VM support. It has low virtual I/O overhead, low latency for emitting file updates, and a scalable design. Its central design principle is distributed streaming of file updates inferred from introspected disk sector writes. The mechanism, called DS-VMI, enables many system administration tasks that involve monitoring files to be performed outside VMs.

FULL PAPER: pdf