Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond the Limitations of Virtual Disks
Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, Mendel Rosenblum

Citation
Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, Mendel Rosenblum. "Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond the Limitations of Virtual Disks". 3rd Symposium of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), May, 2006.

Abstract
Virtual disks are the main form of storage in today's virtual machine environments. They offer many attractive features, including whole system versioning, isolation, and mobility, that are absent from current file systems. Unfortunately, the low-level interface of virtual disks is very coarse-grained, forcing all-or-nothing whole system rollback, and opaque, offering no practical means of sharing. These problems impose serious limitations on virtual disks' usability, security, and ease of management. To overcome these limitations, we offer Ventana, a virtualization aware file system. Ventana combines the file-based storage and sharing benefits of a conventional distributed file system with the versioning, mobility, and access control features that make virtual disks so compelling.

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Citation formats  
  • HTML
    Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, Mendel Rosenblum. <a
    href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/52.html"
    >Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond the
    Limitations of Virtual Disks</a>, 3rd Symposium of
    Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), May,
    2006.
  • Plain text
    Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, Mendel Rosenblum.
    "Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond the
    Limitations of Virtual Disks". 3rd Symposium of
    Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), May,
    2006.
  • BibTeX
    @inproceedings{PfaffGarfinkelRosenblum06_VirtualizationAwareFileSystemsGettingBeyondLimitations,
        author = {Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, Mendel Rosenblum},
        title = {Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond
                  the Limitations of Virtual Disks},
        booktitle = {3rd Symposium of Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation (NSDI)},
        month = {May},
        year = {2006},
        abstract = {Virtual disks are the main form of storage in
                  today's virtual machine environments. They offer
                  many attractive features, including whole system
                  versioning, isolation, and mobility, that are
                  absent from current file systems. Unfortunately,
                  the low-level interface of virtual disks is very
                  coarse-grained, forcing all-or-nothing whole
                  system rollback, and opaque, offering no practical
                  means of sharing. These problems impose serious
                  limitations on virtual disks' usability, security,
                  and ease of management. To overcome these
                  limitations, we offer Ventana, a virtualization
                  aware file system. Ventana combines the file-based
                  storage and sharing benefits of a conventional
                  distributed file system with the versioning,
                  mobility, and access control features that make
                  virtual disks so compelling. },
        URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/52.html}
    }
    

Posted by Mendel Rosenblum on 5 Apr 2006.
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