CLOUD

COMPUTING:CONCEPT,
ADVANTAGES AND
TECHNOLOGIES USED

Student: Ana-Maria Niculescu

GROUP: 1077
 Contents
What is Cloud computing and where did it come from?

Data center: where the equipment is located

BENEFICIAIRES OF CLOUD SERVICES

Main types of services

Software as a service (SaaS) ........................................................................................................ 5

Platform as a service (PaaS) ........................................................................................................ 6

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) ................................................................................................. 6
Public cloud ................................................................................................................................ 7

Private cloud .................................................................................................................................. 7

Hybrid cloud ................................................................................................................................... 7

Cloud Technologies: Virtualization

What is virtualization? .................................................................................................................... 7

Virtualization players...................................................................................................................... 8
Virtualization tools&terminology

Virtual Machine .............................................................................................................................. 9

Hypervisor ....................................................................................................................................... 9

VSphere package ....................................................................................................................... 10

ESXI-host .................................................................................................................................... 10
VCenter ..................................................................................................................................... 11

VSphere Client .......................................................................................................................... 12

Storage Area Network................................................................................................................. 13

iSCSI ............................................................................................................................................... 13
Network Attached Storage .......................................................................................................... 14

VMotion ......................................................................................................................................... 15

Snapshot ....................................................................................................................................... 15

Allocation of resources ............................................................................................................... 16

Resource pool .............................................................................................................................. 16

Ballooning ..................................................................................................................................... 16
Thick Provisioning......................................................................................................................... 16
Thin Provisioning ........................................................................................................................... 17

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Network Virtualization ................................................................................................................. 17

Virtual Switch ............................................................................................................................ 17

Distributed Virtual Switch ......................................................................................................... 18

VMkernel Ports .......................................................................................................................... 18

Main Characteristics of Cloud Computing and their role in Data Safety

Simple failover.............................................................................................................................. 19
Higavailability............................................................................................................................... 19
Cluster ........................................................................................................................................... 20

Data mirroring .............................................................................................................................. 20

Data replication ........................................................................................................................... 20

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 20
Bibliography

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 WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is a type of Internet-based computing that provides shared
computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand.

In this case, the term resources is referring to: computer networks, servers, storage, applications,
and services, including security insurance. These resources can be rapidly provisioned and released
with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

The resources are located in a data centre (a building which hosts the necessary equipment ensuring
the well functioning of the infrastructure :cooling systems, network infrastructure), that may be located
in another city or even another country, and are accessed remotely by the clients.

It has been unanimously agreed that the idea of cloud computing dates back to 1961 when Professor
John McCarthy publicly suggested that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a platform in
future when computing power and even applications could be offered or sold as public utility (similar
to electricity or water). Although idea of time sharing became popular in 1960s, there has been a fall
of popularity later due to lack of software, hardware and networking technologies to enable this
computing model.

Fig. 1.1: The metaphor for cloud computing. All resources are provider-rendered services that are
invisible, as if obscured by a cloud

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We can see how cloud computing has gradually evolved to the form it is now in today. It is still
evolving to address business challenges and keep up with evolutionary changes emerged from social
and market trends, service oriented architecture, Web 2.0, exponential growth in connected devices,
collaboration and social networking.

Fig 1.2 Evolution of the technology which enabled the development of cloud-enabled application

DATA CENTER: WHERE THE EQUIPMENT IS LOCATED

A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such
as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power
supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning,
fire suppression) and various security devices. Large data centers are industrial scale operations
using as much electricity as a small town.

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 Fig 2.1: A data center

B EN EF IC I AIR ES O F C LO U D SER VIC ES

Nowadays, a big part of cloud services beneficiaires are enterprise clients. Cloud computing allows
companies to avoid up-front infrastructure costs as well as utility costs(electricity) and maintenance
services. The main advantage is that this technology enables organizations to focus on their core
businesses instead of spending time and money on computer infrastructure. Other reasons for which
the demand for this service keeps increasing are:

-high computing power

-cheap cost of services

-high performance

-scalability

-high availability

-fault tolerance

-redundancy

SERVICE MODELS

Software as a service (SaaS)

Cloud-based applicationsor software as a servicerun on distant computers in the cloud that are
owned and operated by others and that connect to users computers via the internet and, usually, a
web browser.
The benefits of SaaS
You can sign up and rapidly start using innovative business apps
Apps and data are accessible from any connected computer
No data is lost if your computer breaks, as data is in the cloud

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 The service is able to dynamically scale to usage needs

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a service provides a cloud-based environment with everything required to support the
complete lifecycle of building and delivering web-based (cloud) applicationswithout the cost and
complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware, software, provisioning, and hosting.
The benefits of PaaS
Develop applications and get to market faster
Deploy new web applications to the cloud in minutes
Reduce complexity with middleware as a service

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a service provides companies with computing resources including servers,

networking, storage, and data center space on a pay-per-use basis.
The benefits of IaaS
No need to invest in your own hardware
Infrastructure scales on demand to support dynamic workloads
Flexible, innovative services available on demand

DEPLOYMENT MODELS

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 Public cloud

Public clouds are owned and operated by companies that offer rapid access over a public network to
affordable computing resources. With public cloud services, users dont need to purchase hardware,
software, or supporting infrastructure, which is owned and managed by providers.
Key aspects of public cloud
Innovative SaaS business apps for applications ranging from customer resource management (CRM)
to transaction management and data analytics
Flexible, scalable IaaS for storage and compute services on a moments notice
Powerful PaaS for cloud-based application development and deployment environments

Private cloud

A private cloud is infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally
or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. Private clouds can take advantage of
clouds efficiencies, while providing more control of resources and steering clear of multi-tenancy.
Key aspects of private cloud
A self-service interface controls services, allowing IT staff to quickly provision, allocate, and deliver
on-demand IT resources
Highly automated management of resource pools for everything from compute capability to storage,
analytics, and middleware
Sophisticated security and governance designed for a companys specific requirements

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud uses a private cloud foundation combined with the strategic integration and use of
public cloud services. The reality is a private cloud cant exist in isolation from the rest of a companys
IT resources and the public cloud. Most companies with private clouds will evolve to manage
workloads across data centers, private clouds, and public cloudsthereby creating hybrid clouds.
Key aspects of hybrid cloud
Allows companies to keep the critical applications and sensitive data in a traditional data center
environment or private cloud
Enables taking advantage of public cloud resources like SaaS, for the latest applications, and IaaS,
for elastic virtual resources
Facilitates portability of data, apps and services and more choices for deployment models

Cloud Technologies: Virtualization

What is virtualization?
The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software separates a
physical computing device into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and
managed to perform computing tasks. With operating systemlevel virtualization essentially creating a
scalable system of multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be

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allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT
operations, and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates
the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user
involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and reduces the possibility of
human errors.[37] Users routinely face difficult business problems. Virtualization does, however,
require more bandwidth, storage and processing capacity than a traditional server or desktop if the
physical hardware is going to host multiple running virtual machines. Virtualization describes a
technology in which an application, guest operating system or data storage is abstracted away from
the true underlying hardware or software. A key use of virtualization technology is server
virtualization, which uses a software layer called a hypervisor to emulate the underlying hardware.
This often includes the CPU's memory, I/O and network traffic.

Fig:4.1 Traditional vs. Virtual Architecture

Virtualization players

There are three major x86 server virtualization players: VMware,Citrix, and Microsoft. There are also
vendors who deliver virtualization specific to their own compute platforms such as HP.
VMware: VMware is the best-established virtualization provider with a large installed base of server
virtualization customers. VMwares flagship platform, vSphere,uses hardware emulation.
Citrix: Citrix, which offers a server virtualization product ,called XenServer, uses paravirtualization.
The privileged guest (called the Control Domain in Xen parlance) and the Xen hypervisor work in
tandem to enable guest virtual machines to interact with the underlying hardware.
Microsoft: Microsofts server virtualization product is called Hyper-V. Its architecture is very similar
to that of Xen. Instead of the term domain being used to refer to
guest virtual machines, Hyper-V refers to them as partitions. The counterpart to Xens Control Domain

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is called the Parent partition.
Hewlett-Packard: Hewlett-Packard provides a broad portfolio of virtualization products across
server, storage, network, and client hardware, as well as management software, consulting services,
and outsourcing services. It works closely with the other virtualization technology leaders to integrate
these capabilities into deployment-ready solutions. HPs integrated delivery and outsourcing
capabilities can capitalize your assets and return on investments.

VIRTUALIZATION TOOLS&TERMINOLOGY

Virtual Machine
A virtual machine (VM) is an operating system (OS) or application environment that is installed on
software, which imitates dedicated hardware. The end user has the same experience on a virtual
machine as they would have on dedicated hardware. Most VMs found in cloud infrastructure are
represented by RedHat Linux server(enterprise fully supported, paid distribution of Linux), Windows
Server or even Solaris. The guest operating system, normally interacting with true hardware, is now
doing so with a software emulation of that hardware, and often the guest operating system has no
idea it's on virtualized hardware.

Hypervisor
Specialized software, called a hypervisor, emulates the PC client or server's CPU, memory, hard disk,
network and other hardware resources completely, enabling virtual machines to share the resources.
The hypervisor can emulate multiple virtual hardware platforms that are isolated from each other,
allowing virtual machines to run Linux and Windows Server operating systems on the same
underlying physical host. Hardware emulation is often called bare metal virtualization, to symbolize
the fact that no software sits between the hypervisor and the metal of the server. In this approach to
hardware emulation, the hypervisor intercepts system calls from the guest virtual machines and

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coordinates access to the underlying hardware directly.

VSphere package
VSphere package represents a software produced by VMWare specialized in making virtualization
possible.It includes the following components:

-ESXI host
-VCenter
-VSphrere client

ESXI-host

VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for
deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software
application that one installs in an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS
components, such as a kernel.[2]

ESX runs on bare metal (without running an operating system)[6] unlike other VMware products. It
includes its own kernel: A Linux kernel is started first, from which unnecessary software us eliminated
and is then used to load a variety of specialized virtualization components, including ESX, which is
otherwise known as the vmkernel component.[9] The Linux kernel is the primary virtual machine; it is
invoked by the service console. At normal run-time, the vmkernel is running on the bare computer,

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and the Linux-based service console runs as the first virtual machine. VMWare dropped development
of ESX at version 4.1, and now uses ESXi, which does not include a Linux kernel.

VCenter
vCenter server is installed on Windows Server or Linux Server. VMware vCenter server is a
centralized management application that lets you manage virtual machines and ESXi hosts centrally.
vSphere client is used to access vCenter Server and ultimately manage ESXi servers. vCenter server
is compulsory for enterprises to have enterprise features like vMotion, VMware High Availability,
VMware Update Manager and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). For example, you can
easily clone existing virtual machine in vCenter server. So vCenter is another important part of
vSphere package.

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VSphere Client
vSphere client is a software-web platform allows administrators to connect to ESXi servers and
access or manage virtual machines. vSphere client is installed on the client machine (e.g.
Administrators laptop). The vSphere client is used from client machine to connect to ESXi server and
do management tasks. vSphere is a product suite, ESXi is a hypervisor installed on a physical
machine. vSphere Client is installed on laptop or desktop PC and is used to access ESXi Server to
install and manage virtual machines on ESXi server. vCenter server is installed as virtual machine on
top of ESXi server. vCenter server can also be installed on different standalone physical server, but
why not virtualize it too right? vCenter server is a vSphere component which is mostly used in large
environment where there are many ESXi servers and dozens of virtual machines. The vCenter server
is also accessed by vSphere client for management purpose. So, vSphere client is used to access
ESXi server directly in small environment. In larger environment, vSphere client is used again to
access vCenter serve which ultimately manages ESXi server.

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Storage Area Network
A storage-area network (SAN) is a dedicated high-speed network (or subnetwork) that interconnects
and presents shared pools of storage devices to multiple servers. A storage-area network is typically
assembled using three principle components: cabling, host bus adapters (HBAs) and switches. Each
switch and storage system on the SAN must be interconnected and the physical interconnections
must support bandwidth levels that can adequately handle peak data activities.

iSCSI
Storage-area networks are managed centrally, and Fibre Channel (FC) SANs have the reputation of
being expensive, complex and difficult to manage. The emergence of iSCSI has reduced these
challenges by encapsulating SCSI commands into IP packets for transmission over
an Ethernet connection, rather than an FC connection. iSCSI is a transport layer protocol that
describes how Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) packets should be transported over
a TCP/IP network. iSCSI works by transporting block-level data between an iSCSI initiator on a server
and an iSCSI target on a storage device. The iSCSI protocol encapsulates SCSI commands and
assembles the data in packets for the TCP/IP layer. Packets are sent over the network using a point-
to-point connection.

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Network Attached Storage

NAS consists of a storage appliance that is plugged directly into a network switch. Although there are
exceptions, NAS appliances are often used as file servers. SANs are highly scalable and allow
storage to be exposed as LUNs. In contrast, NAS storage usually exposes storage as a file system,
although some NAS appliances support block storage. In a virtualized environment, the storage pool
is accessible to all the hosts within the cluster and the cluster nodes nodes communicate with the
storage pool over the network through the use of the iSCSI protocol.

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VMotion

VMotion represents the live migration of running virtual machines from one ESXI host to another
ensuring high availability of data and service.

Main advantages:

-zero downtime
-continuous service availability
-complete transaction integrity

It allows users to:

Automatically optimize and allocate entire pools of resources for maximum hardware utilization,
flexibility and availability.

Perform hardware maintenance without scheduled downtime.

Proactively migrate virtual machines away from failing or underperforming servers.

Snapshot
A snapshot preserves the state and data of a virtual machine at a specific point in time.

The state includes the virtual machines power state (for example, powered-on, powered-off,
suspended).
The data includes all of the files that make up the virtual machine. This includes disks,
memory, and other devices, such as virtual network interface cards.

A virtual machine provides several operations for creating and managing snapshots and snapshot
chains. These operations let you create snapshots, revert to any snapshot in the chain, and remove
snapshots. Any data that was writable on a VM becomes read-only when the snapshot is taken. Every
change made after the point the snapshot was taken is registered in a file called delta file. VMware
administrators can take multiple snapshots of a VM to create multiple possible point-in-time restore
points. When a VM reverts to a snapshot, current disk and memory states are deleted and the
snapshot becomes the new parent snapshot for that VM.

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Allocation of resources
Resource pool

A VMware resource pool is the aggregated physical compute hardware -- CPU and memory, as well

as other components -- allocated to virtual machines (VMs) in a VMware virtual infrastructure. The

VMware resource pool manages and optimizes these physical resources for virtual systems within a

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster. With memory overcommit, more resources

can be allocated to VMs than are physically available. Changes that occur in one resource pool will

not affect other, unrelated resource pools VMware administrators create.

Ballooning
Memory ballooning allows the total amount of RAM required by guest VMs to exceed the amount of
physical RAM available on the host. When the host system runs low on physical RAM resources,
memory ballooning allocates it selectively to VMs.

It tricks the OS to think it has more resource available than there are in reality so that RAM can be
allocated. It is based on the idea that not all virtual machines will use maximum amount of memory
during the same period of time. For example, if all the VMs on a host are allocated 8 GB of memory,
some of the VMs will only use half the allotted share. Meanwhile, one VM might need 12 GB of
memory for an intensive process. Memory ballooning allows the host to borrow that unused memory
and allocate it to the VMs with higher memory demand.

Thick Provisioning
In virtual storage, thick provisioning is a type of storage allocation in which the amount of storage
capacity on a disk is pre-allocated on physical storage at the time the disk is created. This means that
creating a 100GB virtual disk actually consumes 100GB of physical disk space, which also means
that the physical storage is unavailable for anything else, even if no data has been written to the disk.

Lazy zeroed:

When vSphere creates a thick provisioned lazy zeroed disk, it allocates the maximum size of the disk
to the VMDK, but does nothing else. At the initial access to each block, vSphere first zeros out the
block, then writes the data. Performance of a thick provisioned lazy zeroed disk is not as good a thick
provisioned eager zero disk because of this added overhead.

Eager zeroed:

When vSphere creates a thick provisioned eager zeroed disk, it allocates the maximum size of the
disk to the VMDK, then zeros out all of that space.Example: If you create an 80 GB thick provisioned
eager zeroed VMDK, vSphere allocates 80 GB and writes 80 GB of zeros.

By overwriting all data in the allocated space with zeros, thick provisioned eager zeroed eliminates
the possibility of reading any residual data from the disk, thereby reducing possible security risks.

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Thin Provisioning
Thin provisioning (TP) is a method of optimizing the efficiency with which the available space is
utilized in storage area networks (SAN). TP operates by allocating disk storage space in a flexible
manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time.

Network Virtualization
Instead of network changes being accomplished by moving cables between and among different
physical network resources, virtualization technology is applied to the network
itself. Network virtualization allows the network to be reconfigured on the fly without any need to touch
a single cable or device. Instead, virtualization-capable network devices are managed
remotely and can be reconfigured logically. This ability to perform network modification remotely and
logically completes the virtualization of the data center. Every type of resource from server to
storage and everything in between is no longer physically tied to specific pieces of hardware.
Instead, every type of resource can be addressed logically and reconfigured without any need to
physically set hands on it.

Virtual Switch
A virtual switch is a software program that allows one virtual machine (VM) (on the same ESXI server
to communicate with another. It is used for forwarding packets and intelligently inspecting them.
Because a virtual switch is intelligent, it can potentially be used to ensure the integrity of a VM's profile
-- including its network and security settings -- as the virtual machine (VM) is migrated across physical
hosts on the network.(248 virtual switches). SWITCH FOR THE HOST

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Distributed Virtual Switch
It is a virtual switch which connects the hosts and gives them access to the network. It is an abstract
representation of many hosts which have the same name, network policy and port group.

It enables VMotion given the fact that while migrating, the virtual machine stays connected to the
same network. The Distributed Virtual Switch extends the ports and the management of a virtual
switch so that the traffic is managed from a centralized perspective. It is a SWITH FOR VCENTER.

VMkernel Ports

The VMkernel ports, which are also referred to as VMkernel networking interfaces or even virtual
adapters in various places, are special constructs used by the vSphere host to communicate with the
outside world. You might recognize these ports due to their naming structure of vmk## with the vmk
portion being a shorthand for VMkernel.

The goal of a VMkernel port is to provide some sort of Layer 2 or Layer 3 services to the vSphere
host. Although a VM can talk to a VMkernel port, they do not consume them directly. Virtual machines
reach physical networks through uplink adapters. A vSphere standard switch can transfer data to
external networks only when one or more network adapters are attached to it. When two or more
adapters are attached to a single standard switch, they are transparently teamed.

Port Properties and Services

VMkernel ports have important jobs to do and are vital for making sure that the vSphere host can be
useful to the VMs. In fact, every VMkernel port can provide any combination of the following six
services:

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 vMotion traffic
Fault tolerance (FT) logging
Management traffic
vSphere replication traffic
iSCSI traffic
NFS traffic

Port group:

Is an association of ports having as main purpose the separation of network traffic in order to ensure
security and safety.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING AND THEIR ROLE IN DATA

SAFETY

Given the demands on IT organizations to continuously improve their operations in order to achieve
business goals, its incumbent upon them to explore how virtualization can help improve quality of
service. Companies run many applications that they consider mission critical, which is a fancy term
meaning that the company relies on these applications for a fundamental part of their business.

Fault tolerance

Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event
of the failure of (or one or more faults within) some of its components. If its operating quality
decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a
naively designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown.

Simple failover
The hypervisor is constantly monitoring each virtual machines status, so its relatively straightforward
to configure it to start a new instance of a virtual machine should notice a previously running virtual
machine is no longer present. Because all the hypervisor has to do is start a new virtual machine
based on the VMs image, the outage duration of a virtual machine may be mere seconds. Obviously,
this is a huge improvement over the minutes-to-days durations typical of non-virtualized system
restores.

Higavailability
High availability (HA) extends the concept of simple failover to incorporate an additional hardware
server. Instead of a crashed virtual machine being started on the same piece of hardware, it is started
on a different server, thereby avoiding the problem of a hardware-precluding virtualization failover.
But how does HA work? After all, how can a hypervisor on one physical server start a VM on another
hypervisor? The answer is, it cant. HA relies on overarching virtualization software that coordinates

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the efforts of multiple hypervisors. When a VM on one hardware server crashes, the coordinating
software starts another VM on a separate hardware server.

Cluster
Clustering is designed to ensure that no data is lost in the event of a software or hardware failure.
Clustering has typically been offered by application vendors as an add-on to their base product, with
some attendant drawbacks like extra expense, redundant solutions, and infrastructure complexity.
Part of the extra expense reflects the fact that you need extra hardware, with the mirrored system on
standby, ready to take over should the primary system fail. How does clustering work? Essentially, the
coordinating virtualization software runs two VMs on separate machines.
The VMs are identical in terms of the OS and application configuration, but differ, naturally, in the
details of their network connections and local hardware. The virtualization supervisor constantly
communicates with the clustered VMs to confirm they are working (this is usually referred to as a
heartbeat, signifying the continued existence of the entity). One VM is the primary server and is the
system that users interact with, and the second VM serves in a backup capacity, ready to stand in
should the primary server go down. The primary server constantly sends any changes to the
secondary server so that its state reflects that of the primary VM at all times. If the primary VM goes
down, the virtualization supervisor notes its unavailability and transparently switches users to the
backup server. New users connecting after the switch dont see anything different theyre just
connecting to what looks like the same application and are unaware its running on a different VM.

Data mirroring
One way of keeping data available is to mirror it. As the name implies, mirroring data means that data
in one place is reflected to another, ensuring that theyre exact copies of one another. Mirroring
enables real-time consistency between two data stores. This makes it possible to immediately shift
between one system and another by attaching the second system to the mirrored data. Mirroring
achieves this real-time consistency by feeding a constant stream of data changes whether
additions, updates, or deletions from one location to another.

Data replication
Data replication is a second service oriented toward improving data quality of service. Unlike
mirroring, which focuses on keeping copies of data consistent in real-time, replication addresses the
need to keep complete copies of data available so that they can be used for system rebuild purposes.
Replication is typically accomplished by sending copies of data to a centralized storage location,
enabling an organization to be certain that it has copies of critical data securely stored in case of a
need to recover some specific data assets.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

http://www.mustbegeek.com/difference-between-vsphere-esxi-and-vcenter/

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2014/02/cloud-computing-basics/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2014/03/is-cloud-computing-secure-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/storage-area-network-SAN

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalI
d=1015180

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/definition/VMware-resource-pool

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