A method of merging VMware disk images through file system unification

This thesis describes a method of merging the contents of two VMware disk images by merging the file systems therein. Thus, two initially disparate file systems are joined to appear and behave as a single file system. The problem of file system namespace unification is not a new one, with predecessors dating as far back as 1988 to present-day descendants such as UnionFS and union mounts. All deal with the same major issues - merging directory contents of source branches and handling any naming conflicts (namespace de-duplication), and allowing top-level edits of file system unions in presence of read-only source branches (copy-on-write). The previous solutions deal with exclusively with file systems themselves, and most perform the bulk of the unification logic at runtime. This project is unique in that both the sources and union are disk images that can be directly run as virtual machines. This lets us exploit various features of the VMware disk image format, eventually prompting us to move the unification logic to an entirely offline process. This decision, however, carry a variety of unique implications and side effects, which we shall also discuss in the paper.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Cheng, Sarah X

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen A. Ward.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62752

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/62752