In modern virtualization platforms virtual machine disks are stored in various kinds of shared repositories which are accessed by thousands of hypervisors simultaneously. Changes are constant. How can you provide high performance access to these resources while ensuring a consistent view of the world across all systems? When bad things happen, how do you restore the integrity of the data?
This talk will share an approach being taken by the oVirt virtualization platform to address these challenging storage problems. Complex storage tasks are broken down into simpler metadata and datapath operations. A set of rules for handling each type will be established. Through several examples, the audience will learn how a combination of SAN-based locking, atomic commitment, and garbage collection can help to achieve a high performance, fault-tolerant storage architecture.
Speakers: Adam Litke