An Evaluation of KVM for Use in Cloud Computing

This paper describes a virtual cluster based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an alternative to VMWare and Xen. Specifically one shows how the virtual cluster is built and tailored to fit virtual organizations. The technique presented in this paper, known as the Virtual Organization Cluster Model, shows great potential for cloud computing. In the implementation, the author used a minimalist installation of Slackware Linux 12 on 14 compute nodes, ensuring minimal host overhead. The prototype Virtual Organization Cluster is composed of 28 virtual computes nodes, each running CentOS 5.1 with Condor, and MPI.