Highly Flexible and Extensible Storage Scheme for Virtualization Platforms under Cloud Computing

This paper proposes a new brand of storage scheme named esStore for cloud computing platform, which provides a flexible and easily extensible image-based storage scheme for virtual machines to solve the issues in image expansion. esStore consists of two major components, esImg and esAgt. The esImg is a new disk image format, which can be easily expanded in storage capacity without complex operations. With esImg, the system is able to save time and resources on the virtual machine (VM) storage expansion. The esAgt, as an in-VM engine, is proposed to parse the esImg and provide file system functions for the VM. The prototype system is implemented and proved to achieve our design goals with satisfactory system performance.