File System Aware Storage Virtualization Management

Abstract

Virtualization has significantly improved hardware utilization, thus, allowing IT service providers to offer a wide range of application, platform and infrastructure solutions through low-cost, commoditized hardware. In this paper we focus on one such layer: storage virtualization, which enables a host system to map a guest VM's file system to almost any storage media. A file system maintains track of the actual storage in an efficient way so as to maximize the throughout and at the same time minimizes the time taken in accessing a memory block by using minimal resources. In this paper we propose Omni, a file system architecture for organization of data and metadata that will efficiently organize and enable sharing besides exploiting the power of storage virtualization and maintaining simplicity in such a highly complex and virtualized environment.