Agentless cloud-wide streaming of guest file system updates

Abstract

We propose a non-intrusive approach for monitoring virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. At the core of this approach is a mechanism for selective real-time monitoring of guest file updates within VM instances. This mechanism is agentless, requiring no guest VM support. It has low virtual I/O overhead, low latency for emitting file updates, and a scalable design. Its central design principle is distributed streaming of file updates inferred from introspected disk sector writes. The mechanism, called DS-VMI, enables many system administration tasks that involve monitoring files to be performed outside VMs.