Scalable virtual machine storage using local disks

Abstract

In virtualized data centers, storage systems have traditionally been treated as black boxes administered separately from the compute nodes. Direct-attached storage is often left unused, to not have VM availabilty depend on individual hosts. Our work aims to integrate storage and compute, addressing the fundamental limitations of contemporary centralized storage solutions. We are building Lithium, a distributed storage system designed specifically for virtualization workloads running in large-scale data centers and clouds. Lithium aims to be scalable, highly available, and compatible with commodity hardware and existing application software. The design of Lithium borrows techniques from Byzantine Fault Tolerance, stream processing, and distributed version control software, and demonstrates their practical applicability to the performance-sensitive task of virtual machine storage