Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 4, numbers 3 and 4, 2011 // View article

Peer-to-Peer Virtualized Services

Authors:
David Bailey
Kevin Vella

Keywords: Virtualization; distributed systems; peer-to-peer computing; service-oriented computing; cloud computing.

Abstract:
This paper describes the design and operation of a peer-to-peer framework for providing, locating and consuming distributed services that are encapsulated within virtual machines. We believe that the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer networks acting in tandem with techniques such as live virtual machine migration and replication facilitate scalable and on-demand provision of services. Furthermore, the use of virtual machines eases the deployment of a wide range of legacy systems that may subsequently be exposed through the framework. To illustrate the feasibility of running distributed services within virtual machines, several computational benchmarks are executed on a compute cluster running our framework, and their performance characteristics are evaluated. While I/O-intensive benchmarks suffer a penalty due to virtualization-related limitations in the prevailing I/O architecture, the performance of processor-bound benchmarks is virtually unaffected. Thus, the combination of peer-to-peer technology and virtualization merits serious consideration as a scalable and ubiquitous basis for distributed services. A view of some challenges and opportunities that emerge in the design of such frameworks is also offered.

Pages: 89 to 102

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 30, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652