CS695 Topics in Virtualizatioan and Cloud Computing
Autumn 2014
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Assignment #2

due date: 


Part 1: Familiarziation with virtualization setups
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As part of this setup you are expected to work with a 
virtualization platform, get to speed with its management
tools, create/destroy/reconfigure virtual machines, get
familiar with tool set available for measurements.

Following steps are required:
1. Choose a virtualization platform---Xen or kvm.
   
   Note: kvm works in hardware-virtualization mode and needs
   hardware support for running virtual machines.

   Get familiar with tools required to setup VMs and also
   to change their configurations.
   e.g., 
   - create VMs with different memory sizes.
   - allocate different amounts of CPU to the VM and verify that
   higher capacity is utilized.

2. Run a workload within a virtual machine, could be any workload.
   A partial possible list is workloads related to file I/O,
   memory benchmarks of CPU benchmarks or you can write your
   own test program.

   Aim: Test whether virtualization affects performance of benchmarks
   and also quantify overheads due to virtualization.

   e.g., if a file/disk I/O is executed on a native systems vs. if
   the benchmark is executed inside a VM, is performance impacted?

   also, what are corresponding virtualization overheads?

   Need to familiarize with tools to measure benachmark performance
   numbers and resource utilization-related measurements in virtualization
   scenarios.

3. Turn in description of Step 2, workload setup, design of experiment,
   results, observarions and inferences.


Part 2: Working with VMs and VMMs.
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In this part you are supposed to implement one of the following,
(i) Implement *new* hypercalls on the Xen platform.

    First, present a motivation/use-case that will require new hypercalls
    to be implemented. Then state, if the hypercall describe how it can
    be used and sample procedures for the same.

    The aim is to implement at least two hypercalls, generate test cases to 
    demonstrate correctness of implementation, design a set of experiments
    to demonstrate the usefulness of the new calls.

(ii) Use the kvm platform to design and implement solutions for virtualization
     related problem scenarios.

     Your solution should start with a usage scenario, requirements, problem statement
     and description, design details, methodology and approach and detailed
     experimentation.

  Sample list of projects are here: 
  http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~puru/courses/autumn14/cs695/assignments/kvm-projects.txt

  http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~puru/courses/spring12/cs695/projects.html

  http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~puru/courses/spring11/cs620/projects.txt

  (note: some of these can be executed on the Xen platform as well.)

 (iii) Any other virtualization related problem that involves non-trival design,
       coding and experimentation.

       *Requires* instructors consent.


Submission guidelines: TBA
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