Cloud of Virtual Clouds for Increasing Isolation Among Execution Domains

• US 20130232486A1
• Filed: 09/13/2012
• Published: 09/05/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 03/01/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Chen, Han, Lei, Hui, Zhang, Zhe
• Granted Patent: US 9,292,317 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45566 Nested virtual machines
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/455 Emulation; Interpretation; Software simulation, e.g. virtualisation or emulation of application or operating system execution engines
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects

Abstract

A method for providing a cloud environment for provisioning a guest virtual machine instance. The method includes selecting at least one machine from a collection of machines as a management node, wherein the at least one machine includes a hypervisor enabled with nested virtualization capability, deploying a plurality of cloud managers on each management node, selecting at least one machine from the collection of machines as a host node, deploying a plurality of level two hypervisors on each host node, forming a plurality of virtual clouds, wherein each virtual cloud contains at least one of the plurality of cloud managers and one of the plurality of level two hypervisors, and provisioning, via the at least one cloud manager, at least one guest virtual machine instance on top of the at least one level two hypervisors.

Claims

1. A method for providing a cloud environment for provisioning a guest virtual machine instance, wherein the method comprises:

selecting at least one machine from a collection of machines as a management node, wherein the at least one machine includes a hypervisor enabled with nested virtualization capability;

deploying a plurality of cloud managers on each management node;

selecting at least one machine from the collection of machines as a host node;

to deploying a plurality of level two hypervisors on each host node;

forming a plurality of virtual clouds, wherein each virtual cloud contains at least one of the plurality of cloud managers and one of the plurality of level two hypervisors; and

provisioning, via the at least one cloud manager, at least one guest virtual machine instance on top of the at least one level two hypervisors;

wherein at least one of the steps is carried out by a computer device.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein provisioning at least one guest virtual machine instance on top of the at least one level two hypervisors comprises provisioning per a request from a cloud user.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein at least two different cloud managers are used.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein at least two different level two hypervisors are used.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

deploying an instance of a single application across each of the plurality of virtual clouds.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising:

running a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol among each application instance.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

controlling communication between the plurality of virtual clouds.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

specifying an amount of physical resources allocated to each of the plurality of virtual clouds.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising:

enabling physical resource allocation modification on each virtual cloud.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein resource over-commitment is allowed within each virtual cloud.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

allocating each virtual cloud on a set of physical hosts.