VMCloner: A Fast and Flexible Virtual Machine Cloner

VMCloner robustly clones a VM into multiple copies which are thereafter placed on different hosts. Avoiding the downtime incurred in installing the operating system for preparing the cloned VM to complete a specified task, the clones share the same initial state. The major focus in the creation of VMCloner has been on the demanding scenarios of services requiring large computations, fixing the problems of admission control, load handling, parallel computing, and efficient job placement. After cloning, each cloned virtual machine can evolve independently, providing similar semantics and configuration setup. This abstraction is useful for supporting cloud server farms with rapid VM deployment. VMCloner provides cloning of virtual machines with large virtual disks in a matter of seconds, fixes the issue of scalability by deploying thousands of VMs, and finally maximizes resource utilization.