Machine virtualization is commonly used in various computing environments, such as in data centers and cloud computing. A typical virtualized computing system comprises multiple compute nodes that are interconnected by a high-speed network. The compute nodes run Virtual Machines (VMs) that consume physical resources such as Central Processing Unit (CPU), memory, persistent storage and networking resources. Some computing systems use distributed File Systems (FSs) for persistent storage of files. Examples of distributed FSs include Google File System (GFS), Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS), Ceph, General Parallel File System (GPFS) and Lustre.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,863,124 and 8,601,473, whose disclosures are incorporated herein by reference, describe techniques for implementing I/O and storage device management in a virtualization environment. A Service VM is employed to control and manage various types of storage devices, including directly attached storage in addition to networked and cloud storage.