Towards the super fluid cloud

Traditionally, the number of VMs running on a server and how quickly these can be migrated has been less than optimal mostly because of the memory and CPU requirements imposed on the system by the full-fledged OSes that the VMs run. More recently, work towards VMs based on minimalistic or specialized OSes has started pushing the envelope of how reactive or fluid the cloud can be. In this demo we will demonstrate how to concurrently execute thousands of Xen-based VMs on a single inexpensive server. We will also show instantiation and migraion of such VMs in tens of milliseconds, and transparent, wide area migration of virtualized middleboxes by combining such VMs with the multi-path TCP (MPTCP) protocol.