Categories
General

Middlewares qualitative comparison 2011

Middlewares Qualitative Comparison (versions of 2011)

This table comparison is a bit extraction of my master’s thesis submitted last year. However, now this information may be outdated because OpenNebula and OpenStack are evolving so fast.
New middlewares and big communities are emerging. Now OpenStack is taking strong. When we began my researches, OpenStack did not exist and during the development of my researches OpenStack is starting to emerge. OpenStack promises a lot and it is an important rival for OpenNebula. But now we think that OpenNebula has a better position to be a standard and it is the best open-source solution. OpenNebula is strong, with experience and ready to demonstrate that now is a better solution than OpenStack, Eucalypthus and others. But OpenStack is supported and funded for big international companies.
OpenNebula, OpenStack and others have a continuous quick evolution. In only few months they published a lot of new features and results. They have an aggressive growing and continuous development. It has been demonstrated that Cloud Computing is not the future else it is the present.
It should be clear that EMOTIVE does not want to compete with products as OpenNebula, OpenStack and others. EMOTIVE is a tool to test and research. So all environments created with EMOTIVE are pre-production environments.
 

Tool

Eucalyptus

OpenNebula

EMOTIVECloud

OpenStack

Main feature

implements cloud semantics

virtualization control framework

virtualization control framework

simple to implement and massively scalable

Highlights

similar than Amazon EC2

Full framework

Schedulers researches

hypervisors, virtual networks and filesystems and the computing engine is orchestrating all of that

Provisioning Model

Immediate

Best-effort

Best-effort

Best-effort

Interfaces

EC2-soap WS API and S3, Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EC2, Sunstone,vCloud, API OCCI (storage,virtualization,network)

WS REST / API OCCI (virtualization,network)

S3 and EC2

Support for Hybrid Cloud

no

Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts

Amazon EC2

S3 and EC2 this year

Hypervisors

XEN,KVM,VMware

XEN, XenServer(beta),KVM,VMWare/ESX

XEN,KVM &VirtualBox

Xen, XenServer, KVM, Hyper-V, VMWare/ESX

Programming framework

Java and C

Ruby and wraps the XML-RPC in JAVA bindings

Java & bash script

bash script, python, others

Flexible architecture

no

yes

yes

Yes (new plugins are emerging)

GUI

no

yes

BETA

yes

Command-Line Interface

yes (unix shell)

yes (unix shell)

similar (Java Client app.)

yes

Image Management

No (Repository)

yes

Only in Debian

Yes

Scheduling

yes

External

yes

Yes

placement policies

round-robin approach and greedy

Packing, Striping and Load-aware, haizea, ecosystem, …

HighAvailability Backfilling, round-robin approach and other researches

Live Migration

no

yes

yes

Yes

High Availability and Backfilling

no

yes

yes

Yes

Architecture

Centralized

Centralized

Descentralized and modular

Configuration

Easy in ubuntu and Medium in others OS

Easy in ubuntu and Medium in others OS

Medium

Beta version

Storage

s3

NFS, SCP, …

NFS, SFTP, FTP, Hadoop, FS, ….

yes

VLAN

no

yes

yes

yes

Currently version

V1.6.2

V3.0Beta

V1.2

Current Release (Cactus ), Next Milestone (Diablo) in Q3 2011

APIs used

EC2

Libvirt and EC2

Libvirt and EC2

Libvirt and Xen API

More contribution

Open Community and Ubuntu

Open Community, Ubuntu and UCM

BSC and UPC

Rackspace or NASA

Community

Big

Big

BSC and UPC

More than 100 developers and architects

Popular

yes

CERN, NIKHEF, D-Grid, SARA, SURF, ESAC-ESA, NCHC, CRS4, CESGA, CESCA, MPS, TID, EGEE, RESERVOIR, StratusLab, OGF OCCI, D-GRID, VENUS-C, NUBA

Only reseach projects (NUBA, BREIN, VENUS-C, OPTIMIS)

Now is growing a lot! (Rackspace, NASA, Rightscale, Citrix, Dell, NTT Data, PEER 1, Softlayer, Cloud..com, iomart Group, Opscode, Puppet Labs, Zenoss, AMD, Intel, Spiceworks, CloudSwitch …)

Documentation

Community, Eucalyptus site, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Community, Opennebula site, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

EMOTIVE web site

http://nova.openstack.org/

Licence

BSD

Apache2

LGPL

Apache2

SO

Linux, Windows

Linux

Linux

Linux

SO (LINUX)

CentOS, Debian, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu (Integred in Ubuntu UEC)

CentOS, Debian, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu (Integred in Ubuntu UEC)

(Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RedHat/CentOS)

CentOS, Debian, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu

Default Placement Policies

Default Placement PoliciesConfigurable Placement Policies

Initial placement based on a requirement/rank policies to prioritize those resources more suitable for the VM using dynamic information, and dynamic placement to consolidate servers

Simple Scheduling and High Availability Scheduling

there are several to choose from (simple, chance, etc) but nova-scheduler is evolving for the future releases

Configurable Placement Policies

No

Support for any static/dynamic placement policy

Easy RESTfull interface to extend with some develop

It is a area of hot development for the future releases of OpenStack Nova

OVF support

No

yes

yes (Alpha)

admin. interface

only EC2 can be used (i.e. no suspend or migration of any kind)

a superior administration interface (migrate, suspend VM,…)

a superior administration interface (migrate, suspend VM,…)

Yes

advance contextualization

No

completed

basic

basic

powerful API to extend

basic (EC2 calls)

yes

yes

http://www.virtualizationtimes.com/does-openstack-change-cloud-game

Users management / Authorization & Authentication

yes

yes

no

Amazon API, VMware’s vCloud, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and others

MySQL support

no

mysql lite and mysql

no

[BETA] sqlite3, mySQL and PostgreSQL

http://www.opennebula.org
http://www.eucalyptus.com
http://www.emotivecloud.net
http://www.openstack.org

Categories
General

Green Clouds

Nowadays the concept of Green Computing (or Green IT) is taking some relevance due to the widespread concerns about issues such as climate change, recycling, biodegradability, etc. In this post, we present the Green Computing focused on Cloud computing and virtualization. So we talk about energy consumption that implies a certain level of CO2 emissions.

It is estimated that the IT sector causes 2% of global CO2 emissions and in some articles it is said that the IT sector produces more carbon emissions than the world of aviation. For example some information published in Daily Telegraph talk about two Google searches produce the same CO2 as boiling a kettle.

Another important fact to keep in mind is that the IT sector is growing constantly, so this implies that energetic consumption is growing. It is an important data that produces more CO2 emissions. According to Greenpeace, world data centers to store Cloud computing services will triple emissions to the atmosphere in 2020. Currently there are several European researches to improve the consumption-performance ratio, especially for datacenters and supercomputers.

The most part of the pollution produced by Cloud computing is caused by world datacenters. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a measure of how efficiently is a computer datacenter using its power; specifically, how much of the power is actually used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead). The overall average is 2, which means that for every watt used in running the equipment, has spent other one to keep cooled this.

Virtualization technology enables the consolidation of multiple workloads and always increases efficiency and most of them save energy on IT equipment, for example, using a smaller number of machines. Nevertheless, virtualization also produces some additional overheads and as a result the rest of the datacenter may be running less efficient. VM creation and VM migration is the most stand out overhead in Virtualization moreover, Virtualization technology use a new layer called hypervisor this means that a little high performance is lost. But virtualization overhead is insignificant in contrast to its advantages.

BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) and UPC (UPC-Barcelona Tech) use EMOTIVE Cloud (software similar than OpenNebula and Openstack) to research about green virtualization. Virtualization requires high density datacenters. Remaining servers are running at higher power consumption levels but there are different ways to deal with this. Energy-aware Scheduling in Virtualized Data Centers is one example. This presents a Scheduler that uses a mathematical algorithm to manage Virtual Machines. Basically, the Scheduler makes a virtual machine consolidation in the minimum number of physical machines and the unused machines will be shutdowned. Scheduler manages the Virtual Machines migrating this to some physical machines to use the maximum possible performance of physical machines. And if there are some physical machines without any virtual machine and in idle mode, scheduler shutdown this server to consume less energy.

There are other solutions presented by others researches (1) (2) but the main idea is the same, the changes are in the idea of the scheduler algorithm. Nowadays commercial middlewares use a generic scheduler as backfilling that pack the VMs in the cluster nodes to reduce VM fragmentation and use the minimum number of physical servers.

Other aspects to considerate that it is important to understand the impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure. The virtualization power savings can produce unexpected results and probably you need to upgrade power and cooling infrastructure to take advantage of the savings opportunity that virtualization offers. You need to worry about power and cooling when it is virtualizing. You may need additional cooling in some physical areas to improve the power efficiency. For example, it cools some areas dynamically depending on the load. Care should be taken to examine the impact on power and cooling because each data center virtualization is different.

A Cloud Admin
 
 
 
(1) CLUES is an energy management system for High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters and Cloud infrastructures. – http://www.grycap.upv.es/clues/eng/index.php
(2)  Green Cloud Scheduler OpenNebula – http://opennebula.org/software:ecosystem:green_cloud_scheduler