Fast, Scalable Disk Imaging with Frisbee

Both researchers and operators of production systems are frequently faced with the need to manipulate entire disk images. Convenient and fast tools for saving, transferring, and installing entire disk images make disaster recovery, operating system installation, and many other tasks significantly easier. In a research environment, making such tools available to users greatly encourages experimentation. We present Frisbee, a system for saving, transferring, and installing entire disk images, whose goals are speed and scalability in a LAN environment. Among the techniques Frisbee uses are an appropriately-adapted method of filesystem-aware compression, a custom applicationlevel reliable multicast protocol, and flexible applicationlevel framing. This design results in a system which can rapidly and reliably distribute a disk image to many clients simultaneously. For example, Frisbee can write a total of 50 gigabytes of data to 80 disks in 34 seconds on commodity PC hardware. We descri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Mike Hibler, Leigh Stoller, Jay Lepreau, Robert Ricci, Chad Barb
• Keywords: Entire Disk Images, Images Make Disaster, Operating System, Reliable Multicast Protocol, USENIX 2003