Parallax - Disk Management for Virtual Machines

Recent News

3.12.08 - Initial Release

Our initial release of Parallax is now available. Enjoy!

Project

Conventional provisioning of virtual machines is hampered by the need to create and populate volumes of storage. A more flexible storage system is needed to support rapid virtual machine creation and state capture.

Parallax works by taking a single, cluster-available volume of storage and accessing it though a block management layer. Our block management layer is organized as a radix tree that enables dynamic block remapping. We support read-only sharing of blocks, which are protected with copy-on-write. Through this mechanism, Parallax can perform very low overhead snapshots, and can quickly provision new volumes based on template images.

Parallax is currently in its initial development release, which is based on Xen. For more information, refer to our latest paper, download the current release, or contact us and join the mailing list.

Papers

Parallax: Virtual Disks for Virtual Machines Dutch T. Meyer, Gitika Aggarwal, Brendan Cully, Geoffrey Lefebvre, Michael J. Feeley, Norman C. Hutchinson, and Andrew Warfield. To appear, EuroSys 2008, March 2008 [pdf]

Parallax: Managing Storage for a Million Machines Andrew Warfield, Russ Ross, Keir Fraser, Christian Limpach, Steven Hand. USENIX Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS), June, 2005. [pdf]

People

Gitika Aggarwal
Brendan Cully
Mohammad Shamma
Mike Feeley
Norm Hutchinson
Geoffrey Lefebvre
Dutch T Meyer
Andrew Warfield

Contact Us

Our mailing list is parallax-l@cs.ubc.ca, to subscribe, send an email to majordomo@cs.ubc.ca with the subject line set to "subscribe parallax-l"

You can also contact us directly by writing to the above address. Public postings are moderated, but the moderator will see all submissions.

Getting started

Parallax uses Mercurial for source control. To get started with Parallax, it needs to be built from sources. Xen source bits are also required.

Xen sources can be retrieved here. Parallax standardizes against xen-3.2-testing.hg, but we periodically test against unstable releases as well.

Parallax sources can be retreived via mercurial from http://dsg.cs.ubc.ca/parallax/hg/parallax-devel.

Once all sources are in place, follow the README files in the parallax directories.

More information on Mercurial is available here.

Acknowledgements

The current release of Parallax was developed at the University of British Columbia through the support of Intel and Network Appliance. The original prototype was developed at the University of Cambridge.