NFS Virtualization

Bhavesh Mehta, Badhri Varanasi

Abstract: We present the design, implementation and evaluation of a Virtualized NFS. In the current implementation of NFS, clients need to be aware of the physical distribution of servers and the locations of files they wish to access. Changes in server state cannot be performed transparent to clients and consequently issues like load balancing become non-trivial. We address this problem by 'virtualizing NFS' i.e. by providing an interface that unifies decentralized storage. We make use of the Click modular router to implement our interface,the c-Proxy. The c-Proxy presents to NFS clients a unified shared file volume with scalable bandwidth and capacity. We achieve an efficient virtualization by processing NFS packets within the kernel. Our  results show that our design incurs minimal overhead, while transparently virtualizing NFS.

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