Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

In recent years, "virtualization" has been a major trend in enterprise computing.  The emerging availability of virtualization support allows  existing, and frequently under-utilized, servers to be transfered into "virtual machines" (VMs).  This approach allows the consolidation of large numbers (10-100) of existing computers onto a single physical system.  Among other benefits, virtualization has been praised for its ability to "green" the datacenter, resulting in a massive reduction in the hardware and electrical power and required for modern computing facilities.This grant is in support of a small virtualization testbed.  Our research goup is investigating low-level services that enhance virtualized environments.  We propose to use this testbed for two purposes: First, we intend to host live server applications that are otherwise running on their own physical machines in our department.  This will allow us to perform a long-term study of real application workloads in a virtualized environment, and to provide real consumers for the virtualization services for storage and high-availability that we have developed over the past year.  Second, this testbed will act as a development facility for ongoing work in our research program.  In particular, the hardware offers newly released virtualization and storage features that are not currently available to us for study.