The Mirage NFS router

Mirage aggregates multiple NFS (network file system) servers into a single, virtual NFS file server. It is interposed between the NFS clients and servers, making the clients believe that they are communicating with a single, large server. Mirage is an NFS router because it routes an NFS request from a client to the proper NFS server, and routes the reply back to the proper client. Experiments with a Mirage prototype show that Mirage effectively virtualizes an NFS server using unmodified clients and servers. Mirage imposes a negligible overhead on a realistic NFS workload. On real world workloads, such as a collection of clients executing compile jobs over NFS, Mirage imposes an overhead of 3% as compared to a proxy that simply forwards packets.