The Manna Plug-In Architecture for Content-based Search of VM Clouds

As cloud computing becomes more popular, collections of virtual machine (VM) images are growing in size. Management of VM collections requires the ability to inspect and search data stored within VM images. We present a plug-in-based architecture, called Manna, for efficiently searching state within VM images through both index and non-index based search. The architecture offers a flexible framework for creating a wide range of new applications that are valuable to both end users and administrators of VM images. We showcase this flexibility through three applications built using Manna’s API: one for searching images, one for searching source code, and one for performing virus scanning. Efficient search for such diverse applications is achieved using two independent mechanisms: plug-ins that are data-type-specific, but independent of data source, and use of VM-specific metadata to shrink the search space of non-indexed data. Trace-driven measurements on our prototype confirm that Manna searches incur low performance overhead.