Snooze - Open-source, Scalable, Autonomic, and Energy-efficient VM Management for Private Clouds

Snooze is an open-source, scalable, autonomic, and energy-efficient virtual machine (VM) management framework for private clouds. Similarly to other VM management frameworks such as Nimbus, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, and OpenStack it allows to build compute infrastructures from virtualized resources. Particularly, once installed and configured users can submit and control the life-cycle of a large number of VMs. However, contrary to existing frameworks for scalability and fault tolerance, Snooze employs a self-organizing and healing (based on Apache ZooKeper) hierarchical architecture. Moreover, it performs distributed VM management and is designed to be energy efficient. Therefore, it implements features to monitor and estimate VM resource (CPU, memory, network Rx, network Tx) demands, detect and resolve overload/underload situations, perform dynamic VM consolidation through live migration, and finally power management to save energy. Last but not least, it integrates a generic scheduler which allows to implement any VM placement algorithms. The system can be either used to manage production data centers or as an experimental testbed for advanced (i.e. requiring live migration support) VM placement algorithms.

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Cisco and Sun to Compete for Unified Computing?

A recent InfoWorld article claims that "With Cisco expected to enter the blade market and Sun expected to offer networking equipment, things could get interesting awfully fast." How does this effect your infrastructure strategy and decisions? Would you consider to build scalable web applications on the Cisco Unified Computing System? Or would you consider to build a router out of a server with the use of OpenSolaris and Project Crossbow as the article suggests? Will any of these initiatives change the way we build scalable web infrastructure or are these just attempts to sale these systems? What do you think?

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Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined)

In this article they present the companies which offers means (mainly, the software and hardware) which powers most of the cloud computing hosting providers, namely virtualization solutions.

Read the entire article about Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined) at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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Product: rPath - Creating and Managing Virtual Appliances

Update: GIGAOM on rPath Burns EC2 Appliances in a Web Portal. rBuilder adds a portal that lets users turn software into virtual appliances. rPath demoed their virtual appliance management system at Monday's AWS Meetup. What they do is help you build a generic virtual machine image deployable on Amazon, VMWare, Xen and other targets. The idea is to build your software application independent of the underlying operating system and deploy it in your own or someone else's datacenter without worrying about all the details. To put their service in context think of rPath as how you build, deploy, and upgrade images and someone like Right Scale has how you can run and managed a cluster of deployed images. To build a Virtual Appliance you pull together all your packages through their web interface or through a Python based "recipe" system, select a VM target, and "cook" it all into a VM image you can immediately deploy and run. To make this magic happen they use the Conary package manager system and they have their own RedHat compatible OS. One of their major features is a very fine grained package management systems which allows them to perform minimal inplace upgrades of deployed images. The downside is you must use their packaging system and their OS for this to work. Any code you want to install must be installable using their packaging system. There's a free community version available on their website for Open Sourcers.. They make their money from people buying a Virtual Appliance of their build and packaging system and deploying it internally. So you can integrate their Virtual Appliance system as part of your build and deployment infrastructure. As part of your nightly build create appliances and have them automatically deployed to your test jigs. Once testing is complete you can deploy into your datacenter. Their smart upgrade features are very nice for a datacenter. Usually package management during upgrades is a complete nightmare. For cloud deployment I think this feature is less useful as I would simply create a new image, fire up a new instance using the new image, and bring down my old images without the cost of a software upgrade. Of course you still have to worry about protocol and data compatibilities. rPath's Virtual Appliance is kind of a hard idea to really understand because it still ahead of curve of what most people are doing. But I think as we move into a world of multiple clouds we must seed with our images, a layer above the clouds is necessary to manage the whole process. rPath is saying we've already built that layer so you don't have to.

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Paper: Container-based Operating System Virtualization: A Scalable, High-performance Alternative to Hypervisors

One stumbling block of the the great march towards virtualization is the relatively poor performance of resource hungry applications like databases. We are told to develop and test using VMs, but deploy without them. Which kind of sucks IMHO. Maybe better virtualization technology can remove this split. This paper talks about a different approach to virtualization called "container-based" virtualization that can reportedly double the performance of traditional hypervisor systems like Xen. It does this by trading isolation for efficiency. Rather than maintaining complete isolation between VMs the container approach shares resources between VMs and thus gives higher performance while still guaranteeing strong fault, resource, and security isolation. It's yet another battle in computing's endless war of creating and destroying abstraction layers. I learned a lot from from this paper because of how it compared and contrasted traditional hypervisor and container based virtualization strategies. Good job.

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