Abstract

Virtual disks are the main form of storage in today’s virtual machine environments. They offer many attractive features, including whole system versioning, isolation, and mobility, that are absent from current file systems. Unfortunately, the low-level interface of virtual disks is very coarse-grained, forcing all-or-nothing whole system rollback, and opaque, offering no practical means of sharing. These problems impose serious limitations on virtual disks ’ usability, security, and ease of management. To overcome these limitations, we offer Ventana, a virtualization aware file system. Ventana combines the filebased storage and sharing benefits of a conventional distributed file system with the versioning, mobility, and access control features that make virtual disks so compelling. 1

Citations