The storage of virtual machine disk image in cloud computing: A survey

Virtual machine (VM) disk image plays an important role in VM's whole life cycle, as a container of VM's operating system, application's running environment and data. The performance of VM accessing to disk images will directly affect the performance of applications running in VM and further the entire cloud computing system. According to the use of cache, the existing VM image storage system are divided into three categories, namely: A) no cache framework; B) local cache framework; C) collaborative cache framework. In this paper, the latest research achievements about the VM image storage systems are reviewed. Then, the challenges of VM image management in cloud data center are also discussed. At last, we points out the possible research direction in the future.