Virtualization Technologies

The Virtualization Technologies group focuses on the development of IT infrastructures utilizing virtualization technologies and systems management technologies. Our group combines cutting-edge research in virtualization infrastructure support with development of the latest virtualization related features in IBM Director 6.1.

IBM Haifa is leading RESERVOIR, a Framework Programme funded by the European Union. The three year project started in February of 2007, with our group being the project coordinator of a consortium of researchers from thirteen different companies and academic institutions from across Europe. This project will develop technologies, prototype code, and reference architecture for the next generation of Cloud Computing, with our group taking a leading role in a number of key technical areas. RESERVOIR is an exciting concept, and we anticipate interesting research and intellectual property.

As part of our efforts to support virtual infrastructures, our group is continuing to develop methods for relocating both virtual machines and their associated storage. At the end of 2006 we successfully demonstrated the ability to relocate a virtual machine across subnet boundaries, while keeping all open network connections alive – i.e. live migration. Currently we are extending this work now to concentrate on migration over long distances with large latencies, such as might be encountered in a compute cloud with large geographical distribution.

Over the last few years with IBM's Systems and Technologies Group, we developed IBM's Virtualization Manager, an extension to IBM Director that allows users to discover, visualize, and manage both physical and virtual systems from a single console. Our work included the image management and CIM client portions of this offering. We are currently extending this work to become part of the next version this offering, IBM Director 6.1. We have been using our ongoing research work in the field of virtual image management to help create the next generation of virtualization functionality for IBM Director. This technology won the ServerWatch Product Excellence Award for 2007, and was honored with the prestigious IBM Research Division Accomplishment Award.

Additional activities in our group include research into algorithms for the placement of virtual machines within a compute cloud, so as to take the maximum advantage of the available resources, and the development of the Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI), an OSGi-based small footprint infrastructure for hosting web applications, web services, etc.

Eliot Salant,