Optimizing Infrastructures for Testing Using Virtualization

Abstract: Virtualization technology and cloud computing have brought a paradigm shift in the way we utilize, deploy and manage computer resources. They allow fast deployment of multiple operating system as containers on physical ma- chines which can be either discarded after use or check- pointed for later re-deployment. At European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), we have been using virtualization technology to quickly setup virtual machines for our developers with preconfigured software to enable them to quickly test/deploy a new version of a software patch for a given application. This paper reports both on the techniques that have been used to setup a private cloud on a commodity hardware and also presents the optimization techniques we used to remove deployment specific performance bottlenecks.