CIVIC: a Hypervisor based Virtual Computing Environment

Abstract

The purpose of virtual computing environment is to improve resource utilization by providing a unified integrated operating platform for users and applications based on aggregation of heterogeneous and autonomous resources. With the rapid development in recent years, hypervisor technologies have become mature and comprehensive with four features, including transparency, isolation, encapsulation and manageability. In this paper, a hypervisor based computing infrastructure, named CIVIC, is proposed. Compared with existing approaches, CIVIC may benefit in several ways. It offers separated and isolated computing environment for end users, and realizes hardware and software consolidation and centralized management. Beside this, CIVIC provides a transparent view to upper layer applications, by hiding the dynamicity, distribution and heterogeneousness of underlying resources. Performance of the infrastructure is evaluated by an initial deployment and experiment. The result shows that CIVIC can facilitate installation, configuration and deployment of network-oriented applications.