CSR-PDOS: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Operating System Support for Server Appliance Consolidation

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Organizations of all sizes have been purchasing an increasing number of single-function computing appliances, such as firewalls, mail filters, Web caches, etc. With the increasing power of commodity processors and hardware, these appliances are often server-class PCs with the operating system and software pre-configured to match the hardware. While this approach provides some initial simplicity, its long-term problems can include a proliferation of machines that require individual OS updates, are harder to upgrade, and that cannot benefit from server consolidation. This research investigates operating system support for appliance-style server development without complete hardware isolation. Some of the mechanisms investigated involve hardware-assisted virtual machines, "soft" virtual machines using OS context support, fine-grained resource isolation and accounting, and more explicit resource management interfaces. Such OS support reduces the resource consumption footprints of each server, and provides mechanisms to share common infrastructure across previously isolated appliances. As a result, developers still retain the benefit of pre-tuned OS and server configurations, without incurring the maintenance overheads for the shared portions of the appliance. This research will produce operating systems modifications to aid consolidating server appliances. We will modify servers to use these features, to demonstrate that they can reduce their resource consumption, become more predictable, and also become easier to program in the process. We will release the modified operating system and demonstrate it with suitable servers that previously would have been run on separate hardware platforms. As processors become faster, and the number of cores increases, this research will simplify computing infrastructure.