WorkReport-MicrosoftResearch.ppt

Joint work: Yuezhi Zhou, Yaoxue Zhang, Tsinghua University, China Yinglian Xie, Carnegie Mellon University Challenge of Enterprise Systems Management of enterprise network systems based on PCs is still a big challenge: PC: Full function desktop computer with native software and data Software maintenance Security Educational Classrooms Military Environments Existing Management Tools Automatically pushing installation images and patches Examples: Marimba, Ghost Difficult to maintain consistency across machines Vulnerable to errors or attacks due to the existence of local data Out of centralized control Why Centralized Management Distributed diskless thick clients, yet centralized repositories of all software and data Reduced software maintenance time Enhanced security Availability Heterogeneous OS and application support Easy software migration Easy data backup and recovery Why Not Thin Clients Performance Poor scalability due to centralized computing Not appropriate for CPU/memory intensive applications Cost Need powerful server Can not leverage the cheap and powerful computing resources of clients TransCom System Overview Virtual Disk Concept Simulate traditional disks, with disk images holding the actual contents on the server Support heterogeneous OSes and applications transparently Boot, Sharing, and Isolation Remote OS boot Launch BIOS-enabled Vdisk access function first (replace INT 13H) Load OS, as if with regular hard disks Vdisk sharing, isolation, and recovery Use different types of Vdisk Copy On Write (COW) for system image protection and recovery Implementation and Deployment Testbed Performance Compared with regular PC One client case is better Ten clients case is comparable Compared with thin-client systems (e.g., Citrix, RDP, and VNC) Application performance (slow-motion, one client) Web browsing: reduce access latency 2-3 times Video playback quality: improve 2-20 times Scalability (i-bench, synchronously) Achieve almost constant latency as oppo