By Sinisa Veseli
Few days ago authors of the GridWay Metascheduler released Technology Preview of their OpenNEbula Virtual Infrastructure Engine (ONE), which enables deployment and management of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources. The software is very similar to the Globus Virtual Workspace Service (VWS), both in architecture and functionality. Both systems provide new service layer on top of the existing virtualization platforms (currently they support only the Xen hypervisor). This layer extends functionality of the underlying Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) from a single machine to a VM provisioning cluster. Both ONE Engine and VWS utilize passwordless SSH access to manage pool of nodes running VMMs, and allow system administrators to deploy new VMs, to start/shutdown and suspend/resume already deployed VMs, as well as to migrate VMs from one physical host to another. The most notable difference between ONE and VWS is that VWS is built on top of the GT infrastructure, and runs within the GT java container. This allows, for example, using RFT for stage-in/stage-out requests to be sent along with the workspace creation requests. On the other hand, the ONE Engine is a standalone service and its installation requirements include only a few software packages that are already present in most linux distributions.
OpenNebula is looking to integrate into the workspace service as a plugin which, as they agree themselves, would replace just a portion of the workspace service's functionality.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the main differences is that the focus of the virtual workspace tools is on the remote user. There is more to that than "start" and "stop." There is a lot of security, auto-configuration and VO integration functionality to get right and generalize. We're tackling some pretty cool use cases!
Addressing your last comments, the workspace service has slim prerequisites...
On the service node it needs Java 1.4+, the ant tool for installation, and some support GT libraries on the service node (and this is just the java core binary JAR distribution, no GT "installation" is necessary).
On the VMM nodes, it needs Python 2.3+, Xen 3, and sudo.
And if you want to integrate it with a local job scheduling system such as PBS (using the workspace pilot tool), you will of course need PBS installed.
OpenNebula is thought to be used as a standalone program to manage a physical cluster turning it into a virtual cluster. As Tim points out, it is also looking to integrate with VWS as a plugin, although it is not its main leitmotiv. The reason behind this decision is to use VWS authorization and communications framework.
ReplyDeleteThe portion it replaces within the VWS is the VM Manager. It is indeed replacing a portion of the functionality Virtual Workspace provides but I think it also extends it by providing features like accounting, scheduling policies, consolidation support, fault tolerance, etc ( http://opennebula.org/doku.php?id=about#features ).
Anyhow we see both projects complementary. OpenNebula is a solution to manage local cluster resources, something similar to VMWare ESX solutions but hypervisor-agnostic (next release will incorporate support for VMWare).