Virtual Disks Performance Analysis Using Flexible I/O and Powerstat

Cloud computing has experienced significant growth in the recent years owing to the various advantages it provides such as 24/7 availability, quick provisioning of resources, easy scalability to name a few. Virtualization is the backbone of cloud computing. Virtual Machines (VMs) are created and executed by a software called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or the hypervisor. It separates compute environments from the actual physical infrastructure. A disk image file representing a single virtual machine is created on the hypervisor’s file system. In this paper, we analysed the runtime performance of multiple different disk image file formats. The analysis comprises of four different parameters of performance namely- bandwidth, latency, input-output operations performed per second (IOPS) and power consumption. The impact of the hypervisor’s block and file sizes is also analysed for the different file formats. The paper aims to act as a reference for the reader in choosing the most appropriate disk file image format for their use case based on the performance comparisons made between different disk image file formats on two different hypervisors – KVM and VirtualBox. Keywords: Virtualization, Virtual disk formats, Cloud computing, fio, KVM, virt-manager, powerstat, VirtualBox.

SCEF: A Model for Prevention of DDoS Attacks From the Cloud

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are some of the biggest threats to network performance and security today. With the advent of cloud computing, these attacks can be performed remotely on rented virtual machines (VMs), potentially increasing their capabilities and making them harder to trace and mitigate, and negatively affecting the cloud service provider as well. By analyzing packet transmission statistics, attacks can be detected on a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that controls the behavior of the VMs. This article proposes a solution to stop such detected attacks from the source, and analyses solutions proposed for a few different types of such attacks. The authors propose a model called selective cloud egress filter (SCEF) which implements specific modules to deal with detected attacks. If an attack is detected, the SCEF relays information to the VMM about which VMs are participating in the attack, allowing for specific corrective action.

Trustworthy Framework for Insider Attack Prevention and Detection

This chapter introduces a trustworthy cloud computing architecture that uses the security properties offered by a virtual machine monitor that enforces the principle of least privilege. These security properties are a strong building block to provide trustworthy cloud computing services to cloud consumers. This chapter briefly explained about a proposed system to prevent insider attacks in cloud environment from cloud consumer and cloud service provider perspectives. The proposed framework is initiating how virtual machines are providing the most reliable security materials of the cloud computing architecture. For cloud consumers, the proposed architecture allocates the well-built security materials of the reliable cloud computing services.

Performance analysis of selected hypervisors (Virtual Machine Monitors - VMMs)

Virtualization of operating systems and network infrastructure plays an important role in current IT projects. With the number of services running on different hardware resources it is easy to provide availability, security and efficiency using virtualizers. All virtualization vendors claim that their hypervisor (virtual machine monitor - VMM) is better than their competitors. In this paper we evaluate performance of different solutions: proprietary software products (Hyper-V, ESXi, OVM, VirtualBox), and open source (Xen). We are using standard benchmark tools to compare efficiency of main hardware components, i.e. CPU (nbench), NIC (netperf), storage (Filebench), memory (ramspeed). Results of each tests are presented.