Virtual Disk based Centralized Management for Enterprise Networks Joint work: Yuezhi Zhou, Yaoxue Zhang, Tsinghua University, China Yinglian Xie, Carnegie Mellon University.
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Virtual Disk based Centralized Management for Enterprise Networks Joint work: Yuezhi Zhou, Yaoxue Zhang, Tsinghua University, China Yinglian Xie, Carnegie Mellon University Challenge of Enterprise Systems • Management of enterprise network systems based on PCs is still a big challenge: – PC: Full function desktop computer with native software and data – Software maintenance – Security Become more complicated with diverse types of OSes and applications coexisting ! Educational Classrooms 1 Every machine has to be installed with OSes and applications 2 System states must be cleaned for each next class Military Environments Failed!!! 1 Devices can access software and data only in a limited physical area 2 No software or data can be carried outside the network boundary Existing Management Tools • Automatically pushing installation images and patches – Examples: Marimba, Ghost • Difficult to maintain consistency across machines – Vulnerable to errors or attacks due to the existence of local data – Out of centralized control Failed Why Centralized Management • Distributed diskless thick clients, yet centralized repositories of all software and data – Reduced software maintenance time – Enhanced security – Availability – Heterogeneous OS and application support – Easy software migration – Easy data backup and recovery Why Not Thin Clients • Performance – Poor scalability due to centralized computing – Not appropriate for CPU/memory intensive applications • Cost – Need powerful server – Can not leverage the cheap and powerful computing resources of clients TransCom System Overview Software repositories Data repositories … Servers Servers Delivery network … TransCom Clients TransCom Clients Client: bare-hardware like computing platform Sever: Regular desktop computers Connected by Ethernet One such server can support 30-50 clients Virtual Disk Concept • Simulate traditional disks, with disk images holding the actual contents on the server • Support heterogeneous OSes and applications transparently Boot, Sharing, and Isolation • Remote OS boot – Launch BIOS-enabled Vdisk access function first (replace INT 13H) – Load OS, as if with regular hard disks • Vdisk sharing, isolation, and recovery – Use different types of Vdisk – Copy On Write (COW) for system image protection and recovery Implementation and Deployment Implementation: prototype system supporting Windows & Linux Location: Central South University of Forestry & Technology in China Usage: e-learning classroom for online English Duration time: from May 2005 to July 2006 Numbers of clients: 30 Before After Maintenance time 4-8 hours per week 30 minutes per week Availability 4-8 hours service down time every Thursday No service interruption Security Virus found, physical theft No virus and worms found, no physical theft Testbed Performance • Compared with regular PC – One client case is better – Ten clients case is comparable • Compared with thin-client systems (e.g., Citrix, RDP, and VNC) – Application performance (slow-motion, one client) • Web browsing: reduce access latency 2-3 times • Video playback quality: improve 2-20 times – Scalability (i-bench, synchronously) • Achieve almost constant latency as opposed to the thin-client systems where latency grows linearly Related Work • Network computers – Proposed by Oracle, Sun, IBM, Apple, etc. – Can not support commodity OS and applications • Thin-client systems – Sun Ray 1 [Sun Micro], RDP [Microsoft], ICA [Citrix] – Centralized computing and storage, need high-end servers • Networked file systems – NFS [Sandberg, 1985] & AFS [Howard, 1988] – Can share user data; hard to share heterogeneous OSes • Virtual machine based approaches – Collective [Chandra, 2005], ISR [Kozuch, 2004] and SoulPad [Caceres, 2005] – Can not achieve native performance Summary and Future Work • Centralizing both software and data reduces the management complexity of enterprise networks • An example prototype: TransCom – Reduce maintenance time and effort – Achieve similar performance to PCs • Future work – Support more types of OSes and devices – Optimize performance Thanks!