The vMatrix: A Network of Virtual Machine Monitors for Dynamic Content Distribution

Today there are many solutions for the caching and distribution of static content (e.g. images, html pages, video files). However, delivering dynamic content and interactive services (e.g. CGI services) remains a challenge due to the many dependencies that such services have on custom libraries, third party modules, operating systems, and server hardware. In this paper we propose a novel solution, which builds on top of the classic operating system concept of a virtual machine monitor (VMM). A VMM allows us to encapsulate the state of the machine in a virtual machine file, which could then be instantiated on any real machine running the VMM software. This eliminates the dependencies problem by allowing us to move the whole machine around, thus reducing the problem of dynamic content distribution to delivering large virtual machine files among real machines running the VMM software. The main challenge is mimicking the original environment surrounding the virtual machine such that it can be transparently transported between real machines without needing to make any software changes. We propose a practical architecture and analyze the performance tradeoffs for two-tier architectures that require connectivity from the mobile front-ends to back-end databases.

[1]  Fred Douglis,et al.  Optimistic deltas for WWW latency reduction , 1997 .

[2]  Marianne Shaw,et al.  Denali: a scalable isolation kernel , 2002, EW 10.

[3]  Michael Dahlin,et al.  End-to-end WAN service availability , 2001, TNET.

[4]  Rajmohan Rajaraman,et al.  A dynamic object replication and migration protocol for an Internet hosting service , 1999, Proceedings. 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (Cat. No.99CB37003).

[5]  Fred Douglis,et al.  HPP: HTML Macro-Preprocessing to Support Dynamic Document Caching , 1997, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[6]  Arun Iyengar,et al.  A publishing system for efficiently creating dynamic Web content , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[7]  Kirk L. Johnson,et al.  The measured performance of content distribution networks , 2001, Comput. Commun..

[8]  Prashant J. Shenoy,et al.  Adaptive push-pull: disseminating dynamic web data , 2001, WWW '01.

[9]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Opus: an overlay peer utility service , 2002, 2002 IEEE Open Architectures and Network Programming Proceedings. OPENARCH 2002 (Cat. No.02EX571).

[10]  Syam Gadde,et al.  Web caching and content distribution: a view from the interior , 2001, Comput. Commun..