Achieving method of high-performance elastic-capacity virtual machine disk

Abstract

The invention relates to an achieving method of a high-performance elastic-capacity virtual machine disk. The achieving method is characterized by being achieved according to a sparse file mechanism, a logical volume management mechanism and a virtual machine disk aligning principle. The achieving method comprises the steps of (1) adopting the sparse file mechanism to achieve the elastic-capacity virtual machine disk, (2) adopting the logical volume management (LVM) mechanism to achieve on-line capacity expansion of a disk space, (3) adopting the virtual machine disk aligning principle. By means of the achieving method, at least more than 50% of memory space can be greatly saved in a cloud computing environment. In addition, the input-output (IO) performance of the virtual machine disk reaches to more than 90% of the IO performance of a physical file system.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to a method for realizing a high-performance flexible capacity virtual machine disk. Background technique [0002] Using image files as virtual machine disks is currently the most popular form of server virtualization, which is simple and easy to manage. Taking xen as an example, currently creating a virtual machine on the xen platform usually creates an image file through the Linux tool dd, and then adds the image file to the virtual machine configuration file. Then start the virtual machine to format the disk and install the operating system. [0003] There are several serious problems in the current technology. 1) The first problem is that the size of the image file is fixed, and the space required for future applications needs to be planned when it is created. Assume that the current installation system plus some preliminary requirements may only require 15GB of space, but after the increase in later applications, a larger c...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Assume that the current installation system plus some preliminary requirements may only need 15GB of space, but after the increase in later applications, a larger capacity is required

If the created image file is too small, the subsequent application may not be able to continue. How can we expand the capacity at this time? If the image file created is too large, it will waste space

For example, the installation of the operating system and initial configuration requires 15GB of space, and 100GB of space will be required in the future. Considering future needs, we allocate a 100GB image file, but this will undoubtedly waste the storage space of the system

If there are many such image files, the space wasted by the system will be very considerable.

2) The second problem is that the IO performance of the image file as a virtual machine disk is very poor

Can only deal with general business needs

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