Cloud Platform Overview
Probably everyone is already tired of these same clouds, but briefly dwell on what they are if someone does not know. Depending on the deployment model, they are:
- private cloud
- public cloud
- hybrid cloud
More details can be found here .
Depending on the service model:
So, today we will talk about platforms for building IaaS clouds. Go!
Cloudstack 3.0.0
Description
Cloudstack is the computing resource management console of your data center. Large companies such as Zynga, Nokia Research Center, Cloudcentral and others built their clouds on this platform. The development of the project is carried out by Citrix. The platform has its own API, which allows you to configure and integrate the platform with your existing infrastructure, and using the CloudBridge Amazon EC2 adapter, you can convert the Amazon API to the Cloudstack API. A complete list of commands supported by the adapter can be found here . Key platform features:
- Hypervisors Agnostic (KVM, XEN, ESXi, OVM, BareMetal)
- Roles
- Virtual network
- Resource pool
- Snapshots and volumes
- Virtual routers, firewall and load balancer
- Live migration with host maintenance
When working with the ESXi hypervisor, the platform uses the vCenter API. Thus, the implementation of the platform in the existing infrastructure built on VMware will be easy.
Cost
The best part is that at the moment Cloudstack is free and distributed under the GNU Public License Version 3. If you are interested in paid support, then you need to contact the developers via email.
Community
During the installation of the platform, many problems can arise. You can try to solve them by contacting the community. The forum discusses a lot of issues and helps to solve them. There is a channel in the IRC where you can also ask questions.
Documentation
Probably a fairly important element in all products is the documentation . It determines how easy it will be for a user to enter this technology. The simpler and clearer the documentation, the greater the chance that any interested person can install the platform. If you have a certain background, then you will easily perform a simple installation of the platform, this is enough to familiarize yourself. More complex installation and planning of the architecture will take a lot of time, in the documentation not all the features are disclosed. The documentation is done in the style of step by step and does not describe how the platform works. Part of the knowledge will come to you only after the actual use of the platform.
Experience
Basic installation and setup. Using VMware clusters and kvm clusters. The operating system used was CentOS 6.2. Successfully connected our cloud to the management console from Rightscale. When using CentOS 6 version, problems may occur when starting libvirtd. To solve these problems, you need to add in /etc/cgconfig.conf: After that, do /etc/init.d/cgconfig restart and try to run libvirtd. There may also be problems with the console through the site. One problem is that on vnc server hosts it runs on 127.0.0.1 address. To check it, run: If you have the address 127.0.0.1 after executing this command, then you need to uncomment the line in the /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf file: and restart the virtual machines.
group virt {
cpu {
cpu.shares = 9216;
}
}netstat -nlp | grep kvm
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5900 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 11673/qemu-kvm
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5901 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 11872/qemu-kvm
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5902 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 15227/qemu-kvm
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5903 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 12587/qemu-kvm vnc_listen = "0.0.0.0"conclusions
A very interesting cloud management console. Excellent functionality, free and fast growing. You can implement it in a real infrastructure, but if we use only ESXi hypervisors, then vCloud Director will be the best option.
Eucalyptus Open Source 2.0.3
Description
Eucalyptus is another cloud building platform. Large companies such as Sony, Puma, NASA, Trend micro and others built their Private Cloud on this platform. There are 2 editions of Eucalyptus: paid and free. In these versions, the functionality is very different. The main advantage that Eucalyptus is trying to convey to users is that its API is fully compatible with Amazon API. That is, all scripts and programs that work with the Amazon API can be used for your cloud, built on the Eucalyptus platform. Eucalyptus supports 3 hypervisors: XEN, KVM, ESXi. The latter (ESXi) is supported only in the Enterprise version.
Main advantages:
- Roles
- Hypervisor agnostic
- Clustering and zonning
- Flexible Network Management, Security Groups, Traffic Isolation
Cost
As I wrote above, there is a free and paid version. Eucalyptus open source and Ecalyptus Enterprise Cloud. The differences between the versions can be found here.
Community
I could not evaluate the community of this product. Everything was installed without any problems.
Documentation
The product has installation documentation, but it does not disclose all aspects. It is assumed that a person has a large background. There are no settings for virtualization itself. When installing a more complex configuration, the documentation does not help, you should rely only on your competence.
Experience
Installation, configuration according to the documentation. CentOS 5.5 was used as the operating system for the cloud controller; CentOS 5.5 with the XEN hypervisor was chosen as the operating system for the host. Also connected our cloud to Rightscale. There is no management console as such, so you have to either manage it using euca2tools or connect it to RightScale. Although, the paid version has its own management console. During installation, the following problems occurred:
1) When installing some dependencies in turn, they refused to install. The solution was to install dependencies in one go. Solution: 2) After installing the platform when starting the controller, the following errors may occur: To solve the problem, turn off Selinux.
rpm -Uvh python25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
libpython2.5.so.1.0()(64bit) is needed by python25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64rpm -Uvh python25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm python25-devel-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm python25-libs-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm/etc/init.d/eucalyptus-cc start
Starting Eucalyptus cluster controller:
Enabling IP forwarding(13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:8774
(13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:8774
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
Failed to start the CC!3) If you do not have enough experience with XEN, then problems may arise with its use. After installing XEN in /etc/grub/menu.lst, you need to fix default = 1 -> default = 0 to boot the kernel from XEN.
4) Also in CentOS, you need to create a libvirt group and add the user who runs eucalyptus there.
conclusions
It’s damp somehow. The free version is not particularly actively developing. There are problems. Perhaps the commercial version is much better. During the study of the platforms, we made a request for a trial version of a commercial product, but we failed to evaluate the functionality of the commercial version.
vCloud Director 1.5
Description
vCloud Director is a platform for building clouds from VMware. If your entire infrastructure is built on VMware, then introducing vCloud Director would be the perfect solution. vCloud Director allows you to build truly hybrid clouds. With VMware vCloud Connector, you can migrate your virtual machines between your public cloud and private cloud. Key Features:
- Virtual datacenters
- vShield Security Technologies
- Infrastructure Service Catalog
- Multi-tenant organizations
- Self-service Portal
- VMware vCloud API, Open Virtualization Format, and Callouts
Cost
Paid. In order to find out the approximate price of a package that suits you, you need to contact regional managers.
Community
Because VMware is a market leader, it has a great community . Great support in the form of knowledge base. Do not forget about paid support and support after purchasing products from VMware.
Documentation
Paid products always have good documentation . And as practice has shown, if you follow it, the installation will pass without problems.
Experience
Install and configure vCloud Director. To install vCloud Director itself, you need Red Hat. There are also components without which vCloud Director will not install:
- vCenter (with clusters and DRS)
- vShield
It is not difficult to guess that vCloud Director is using the vCenter API. Accordingly, we get all the vSphere functionality with you if we build our cloud using vCloud Director.
conclusions
The main disadvantage is that it is paid, but if you already use virtualization from VMware, then vCloud Director would be your ideal option.
Openstack 2011.3
Description
Openstack 2011.3 is an open source platform for building clouds. The Openstack project includes 3 products: Nova (an analogue of Amazon EC2), Swift (an analogue of Amazon S3), Glance (a service for providing images). In our comparison, we will consider only Nova, but it is worth paying attention to Swift - the product is unique in its way and many products make integration with it (Cloudstack 3). At the moment, Nova maintains at a decent level 2 hypervisors: KVM and XEN. The platform is developing rapidly and promises great functionality. It has a huge community and support from such corporations as: Cisco, Dell, NASA, Intel, AMD, Citrix, Rackspace, Rightscale. The main core of Openstack was the Nebula, developed by NASA. Key Features:
- Manage virtualized commodity server resources
- Manage Local Area Networks
- Virtual Machine (VM) image management
- Security groups
- Role Based Access Control
- Projects & quotas
- VNC Proxy through web browser
Cost
The product is completely free, open source, but do not forget about helping the community to develop the product.
Community
In my opinion, Openstack, of all the platforms we are considering, has the largest and most active community . Due to the fact that the product is actively developing with it, there are many problems and very often people help to solve these problems.
Documentation
Openstack has problems with the documentation . Due to the rapid development of the product, the documentation just does not have time to update. There are not many important things and you have to find out on the forums or in the IRC .
Experience
Basic installation and configuration of Nova, keystone, dashboard. For virtualization, we used KVM.
conclusions
The platform is free and rapidly developing, but still too crude. To implement it in a real infrastructure, you need a team of Python developers who will bring it to mind. If you have any developments for Amazon, then compatibility with the Amazon API will help you. There is an Openstack Dashboard in the project incubator, which does not always provide 100% functionality due to the redesign of the API.
Summary table of key product features
