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With the ever-growing application workload needs of datacenters comes the requirement to dynamically create virtual environments. This creates a need for the ability to provision and customize virtual machines on-the-fly. Every virtual machine created needs to be provisioned with a CPU, memory, network and I/O resources.
As the number of guest virtual machines increase on the physical host, it becomes increasingly important to have an automatic, space-optimizing provisioning mechanism. Space-savings can be achieved as all the guest virtual machines can be installed with the same operating system, i.e., boot volume. Hence, rather than allocate a full boot volume for each guest, it is sufficient to create single boot volume and use space-optimized snapshots of that "Golden Boot Volume" as boot images for other virtual machines.
The primary I/O resource needed is a boot image, which is an operating system environment that consists of: the following
A bootable virtual disk with the guest operating system installed
A bootable, a guest file system
A custom or generic software stack
For boot image management, Veritas InfoScale Solutions products enable you to manage and instantly deploy virtual machines based on templates and snapshot-based boot images (snapshots may be full or space optimized). For effective boot image management in KVM based virtual environments, deploy the Veritas InfoScale Solutions products in the combined host and guest configuration.
Benefits of boot image management:
Eliminates the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with installing the operating system and complex stacks of software
Infrastructure cost savings due to increased efficiency and reduced operational costs.
Reduced storage space costs due to shared master or gold image as well as space-optimized boot images for the various virtual machines
Enables high availability of individual guest machines with Cluster Server (running on the host) monitoring the VM guests and their boot images
Ability to create and deploy virtual machines across any remote node in the cluster