Optimizing Infrastructures for Testing Using Virtualization

TL;DR

This paper discusses how virtualization and cloud computing are used at CERN to rapidly deploy virtual machines, and details optimization techniques to improve deployment performance on commodity hardware.

Contribution

It presents methods for setting up a private cloud and optimizing virtualization deployment to enhance testing infrastructure efficiency.

Findings

Successful setup of a private cloud on commodity hardware

Identification and removal of deployment performance bottlenecks

Improved deployment speed for testing environments

Abstract

Virtualization technology and cloud computing have brought a paradigm shift in the way we utilize, deploy and manage computer resources. They allow fast deployment of multiple operating system as containers on physical ma- chines which can be either discarded after use or check- pointed for later re-deployment. At European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), we have been using virtualization technology to quickly setup virtual machines for our developers with preconfigured software to enable them to quickly test/deploy a new version of a software patch for a given application. This paper reports both on the techniques that have been used to setup a private cloud on a commodity hardware and also presents the optimization techniques we used to remove deployment specific performance bottlenecks.