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Large-scale virtual machines provisioning in clouds: challenges and approaches

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Abstract

The scale of global data center market has been explosive in recent years. As the market grows, the demand for fast provisioning of the virtual resources to support elastic, manageable, and economical computing over the cloud becomes high. Fast provisioning of large-scale virtual machines (VMs), in particular, is critical to guarantee quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we systematically review the existing VM provisioning schemes and classify them in three main categories. We discuss the features and research status of each category, and introduce two recent solutions, VMThunder and VMThunder+, both of which can provision hundreds of VMs in seconds.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Zhaoning Zhang & Dongsheng Li

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Victoria, Victoria, V8W 2Y2, Canada

    Kui Wu

Authors
  1. Zhaoning Zhang
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  2. Dongsheng Li
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  3. Kui Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dongsheng Li.

Additional information

Zhaoning Zhang received his MS in Computer Science at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2009. He was a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department, University of Victoria, Canada and is currently a PhD student in the Computer School of NUDT. His research focuses on virtualization and block-level distributed storage.

Dongsheng Li received his PhD (with honor) at National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2005. He is currently a professor in the Computer School of NUDT. His research interests include cloud computing, computer networks and data management.

Kui Wu received his BS and the MS in Computer Science from Wuhan University, China in 1990 and 1993, respectively, and his PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2002. He joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada in 2002 and is currently a Professor there. His research interests include mobile and wireless networks, network performance evaluation, and cloud computing.

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Zhang, Z., Li, D. & Wu, K. Large-scale virtual machines provisioning in clouds: challenges and approaches. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 2–18 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4420-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4420-7

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