Magellan Final Report - Office of Science - U.S. Department of Energy

Magellan Final Report
While both private and public clouds may strive to be ”unlimited”, in practice this is impractical. Having
a mechanism to queue requests is useful for many scientific application use cases.
Logging and Monitoring. Eucalyptus has verbose logging that could be useful for tracking events occurring
on the systems. However, monitoring capabilities to understand the behavior of the virtual machines,
detect failures, and rectify failure events at the service level are limited. Early versions of Eucalyptus (i.e.
1.6.2) also had limited ability to recover gracefully from system-level failures. For example, restarting the
Cloud Controller would typically result in the loss of IP address assignments for running instances and require
all running instances to be terminated in order to fully recover.
Portability. Eucalyptus provides an Amazon-compatible user API to manage virtual machines. This
enables easy portability of tools and applications between the public and private cloud. However, moving
images between the two systems still requires a fair amount of IT expertise and can be time consuming and
tedious.
Figure 6.2: Architecture diagram for OpenStack cloud software stack.
6.2 OpenStack Nova
OpenStack is a fully open-sourced joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) and Rackspace that implements compute and storage components. OpenStack offers greater
flexibility for a heterogeneous physical infrastructure, and provides extensive support for customization and
configuration. While OpenStack is relatively new, a number of organizations and vendors have adopted
OpenStack as their preferred cloud management technology, and the size and activity of their user community
has grown. In less than a year, the number of dedicated developers on the project has expanded more
than tenfold, and they remain accessible to the user community via various methods.
A number of different versions of OpenStack were tested during the Magellan project. Like Eucalyptus,
OpenStack is still very much in a development stage, and successfully installing and running this software in
our environment required a significant amount of modification to both the code and the underlying system
and network architecture. The effort expended yielded significant results, including instance uptimes of
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