Title: Assessing virtualisation infrastructures for modern IT systems

Proposer: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Suggested supervisors: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Goal: Assessing virtualisation infrastructures for modern IT systems

Description:

A trend in complex IT infrastructures is to use virtual machines (VMs) in order to isolate the execution of specific services within one logical machine and to run several such VMs on one, powerful, resource-rich compute-server. This simplifies the configuration, because services can be tailored in isolation, reduces interference, because separate VMs can not directly access each others resources, and simplifies migration, because an entire VM can be moved to a different physical machine if need be. On top of such virtualisation infrastructures, cloud services can be built, that handle tasks such as migration automatically, provide scalability and a high level of reliability. However, using VMs also imposes a significant resource overhead and adds complexity.

The goal of this project is to use several virtualisation infrastructures, to install a minimal tool-set of software development tools, and to assess the performance of the system. Of interest are the runtime of specific benchmarks, the overall memory footprint of the entire infrastructure, and the latency between VMs on one physical machine. Tests should also address the scalability of this approach on one machine.

• Survey available virtualisation infrastructures
• Install a set of relevant virtualisation infrastructures on Linux
• and Windows machines
• Install a set of tools for software development and testing in the VMs
• Perform benchmarks on the VMs assessing runtime, resource-utilisation and latency
• Analyse the results and develop recommendations for the usage of
• these virtualisation infrastructures in modern IT infrastructures
• Optionally, explore the suitability of the tested infrastructures for cloud computing.

Resources required: Linux machine

Degree of difficulty: Easy

Background needed: Basic systems knowledge

References: