A Cloud Service Cache System Based on Memory Template of Virtual Machine

In data centers and cloud computing environments, the number of virtual machines (VMs) increases when the number of service requests increases. Since services are invoked on demand, the corresponding virtual machines will be created and shut down frequently. This makes the time of starting a virtual machine a crucial performance bottleneck for services in data centers. Besides, if virtual machines read image files from disks to start themselves, additional overhead to access disk will be generated. In this paper, we present a cloud service cache system based on memory template of virtual machines - VCache to improve the response time of cloud computing services, and to reduce the disk access overhead. This system can create and maintain service cache VMs through memory templates, which are snapshots of running virtual machines. By creating virtual machines from cached image files, the service running in these VMs can be deployed rapidly, which greatly reduces the launching time of the service and disk I/O load. We evaluate our system with experiments, and the experimental results show that the average time for creating a VM is reduced about 80% and the amount of data through disk access decreases more than 50%.