Virtualization Technologies

The Virtualization Technologies group focuses on the development of infrastructures utilizing virtualization technologies and on systems management. Our group combines cutting-edge research in virtualization infrastructure with collaboration with the global team developing IBM's System Director offering, and in particular, contributing to the development of the VmControl extension.

Our current research for VmControl has produced support for virtual image management technologies and smarter algorithms to minimize the migration time of LPAR migrations from one physical host to another.

IBM Research - Haifa is leading RESERVOIR, a Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) research consortium funded by the European Union. This three-year project started in February 2007, with our group leading a consortium of researchers from thirteen different companies and academic institutions from across Europe. This project is developing technologies, prototype code, and reference architecture for the next generation of cloud computing, with our group taking a leading role in a number of key technical areas. RESERVOIR is an exciting concept, and we are involved in interesting research and intellectual property.

As part of our efforts to support virtual infrastructures, our group is continuing to develop methods for relocating both virtual machines and their associated storage. We have demonstrated the ability to relocate a virtual machine across subnet boundaries while keeping all open network connections alive, i.e., live migration, and have donated code to the KVM Open Source community to allow for live migration of virtual machines which do not share storage. Currently we are extending this work to concentrate on the federation of clouds.

Additionally, we are researching methods of optimizing the amount of time required to migrate all virtual machines off of a physical host in the event of an emergency evacuation, including using machine learning techniques. We are planning to expand this work to cover the simultaneous evacuation of multiple hosts.

Eliot Salant,