By Ignacio Martin Llorente
Virtualization has opened up avenues for new resource management
techniques within the data center. Probably, the most important
characteristic is its ability to dynamically shape a given hardware
infrastructure to support different services with varying workloads.
Therefore, effectively decoupling the management of the service (for
example a web server or a computing cluster) from the management of the
infrastructure (e.g. the resources allocated to each service or the
interconnection network).
key component in this scenario is the virtual machine manager. A VM
manager is responsible for the efficient management of the virtual
infrastructure as a whole, by providing basic functionality for the
deployment, control and monitoring of VMs on a distributed pool of
resources. Usually, these VM managers also offer high availability
capabilities and scheduling policies for VM placement and physical
resource selection. Taking advantage of the underlying virtualization
technologies and according to a set of predefined policies, the VM
manager is able to adapt the physical infrastructure to the services it
supports and their current load. This adaptation usually involves the
deployment of new VMs or the migration of running VMs to optimize their
placement.
The dsa-research group
at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid has released under the terms
of the Apache License, Version 2.0, the first stable version of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine.
OpenNebula enables the dynamic allocation of virtual machines on a pool
of physical resources, so extending the benefits of existing
virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of
resources, decoupling the server not only from the physical
infrastructure but also from the physical location. OpenNebula is a
component being enhanced within the context of the RESERVOIR European Project.
The new VM manger differentiates from existing VM managers in its
highly modular and open architecture designed to meet the requirements
of cluster administrators. OpenNebula 1.0 supports Xen and KVM
virtualization platforms to provide several features and capabilities
for VM dynamic management, such as centralized management, efficient
resource management, powerful API and CLI interfaces for monitoring and
controlling VMs and physical resources, fault tolerant design... Two of
the outstanding new features are its support for advance reservation
leases and on-demand access to remote cloud provider
Support for Advance Reservation Leases
Haizea
is an open source lease management architecture that OpenNebula can use
as a scheduling backend. Haizea uses leases as a fundamental resource
provisioning abstraction, and implements those leases as virtual
machines, taking into account the overhead of using virtual machines
(e.g., deploying a disk image for a VM) when scheduling leases. Using
OpenNebula with Haizea allows resource providers to lease their
resources, using potentially complex lease terms, instead of only
allowing users to request VMs that must start immediately.
Support to Access on-Demand to Amazon EC2 resources
Recently, virtualization has also brought about a new utility
computing model, called cloud computing, for the on-demand provision of
virtualized resources as a service. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloudi
s probably the best example of this new paradigm for the elastic
capacity providing. Thanks to virtualization, the clouds can be used
efficiently to supplement local capacity with outsourced resources. The
joint use of these two technologies, VM managers and clouds, will
change arguably the structure and economics of current data centers.
OpenNebula provides support to access Amazon EC2 resources to
supplement local resources with cloud resources to satisfy peak or
fluctuating demands.
Scale-out of Computing Clusters with OpenNebula and Amazon EC2
As use case to illustrate the new capabilities provided by OpenNebula, the release includes documentation
about the application of this new paradigm (i.e. the combination of VM
managers and cloud computing) to a computing cluster, a typical data
center service. The use of a new virtualization layer between the
computing cluster and the physical infrastructure extends the classical
benefits of VMs to the computing cluster, so providing cluster
consolidation, cluster partitioning and support for heterogeneous
workloads. Moreover, the integration of the cloud in this layer allows
the cluster to grow on-demand with additional computational resources
to satisfy peak demands.
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