  Virtualization technology and cloud computing have brought a paradigm shift
in the way we utilize, deploy and manage computer resources. They allow fast
deployment of multiple operating system as containers on physical ma- chines
which can be either discarded after use or check- pointed for later
re-deployment. At European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), we have
been using virtualization technology to quickly setup virtual machines for our
developers with preconfigured software to enable them to quickly test/deploy a
new version of a software patch for a given application. This paper reports
both on the techniques that have been used to setup a private cloud on a
commodity hardware and also presents the optimization techniques we used to
remove deployment specific performance bottlenecks.
