4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 1

6-ON THE MANAGEMENT

OF VIRTUAL MACHINES
FOR CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURES
Cloud Computing
Principles and Paradigms
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 2

IaaS Anatomy
• IaaS provider characteristic
1. on-demand provisioning of computational resources
2. Virtualization technologies to lease resources
3. Provide public and simple remote interfaces to manage resources
4. use a pay-as-you-go cost model
5. “infinite capacity” or “unlimited elasticity”
• Private and hybrid clouds share these same characteristics but,
instead of selling capacity over publicly accessible interfaces,
focus on providing capacity to an organization’s internal users.
• Role of Virtualization
• More flexible and generic (group of things) way of managing their resources.
• Allocating resources efficiently
• Taking into account an organization’s goals (minimizing power consumption
and other operational costs)
• Reacting to changes in the physical infrastructure
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 3

IaaS Anatomy
• Problems In VM Solutions
• Distributed management of virtual machines
• Reservation-based provisioning of virtualized resource
• Provisioning to meet SLA commitments
• RESERVOIR project
• Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 4

DISTRIBUTED
MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 5

Distributed Management
• How to Manage the virtual infrastructures themselves
• Efficiently selecting or scheduling computational resources
• VM-based resource scheduling
• Static approach -(greedy allocation strategy)- local optimum- makes
choice that looks best at that moment.
• Efficiency approach- VI managers must support flexible and
complex schedule resources (the ability of VMs to suspend, resume,
and migrate.)
• Solution
• Virtual Infrastructure Manager
• Managing VMs in a pool of distributed physical resources.
• Case Study
• OpenNebula
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 6

VM Model and Life Cycle (OpenNebula)

• VM model attributes
• A capacity in terms of memory and CPU
• A set of disk images
• A state file (optional) or recovery file
• Life Cycle
• Resource Selection
• Resource Preparation
• Contextualization( setting up the network and the machine
hostname)
• VM Creation- VM booted by the resource hypervisor
• VM Migration- migrate to more suitable resource
• VM Termination- VM is going to shut down
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 7

• A set of disk images.

• In general it might be necessary to transfer some of these
image files to/from the physical machine the VM will be
running in.

• A state file (optional) or recovery file that contains the

memory image of a running VM plus some
hypervisor-specific information.
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 8

Resource selection:
Once a VM is requested to OpenNebula, a feasible
placement plan for the VM must be made.
allowing site administrators to configure the scheduler to
prioritize the resources that are more suitable for the VM

Resource preparation:
The disk images of the VM are transferred to the target
physical resource. During the boot process, the VM is
contextualized, a process where the disk images are
specialized to work in a given environment.

VM termination:
• changes in the VM can be kept for a future use
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 9

VM Management
(OpenNebula)

•Management Areas
•Virtualization
•physical resource
•Image management
•Networking
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 10

Virtualization
• How?
• Interfacing with the physical resource virtualization
technology (hypervisors like Xen, KVM)

• More detail
• Pluggable drivers
• Decouple the managing process from the underlying
technology
• High-level command
• start VM, stop VM
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 11

Image Management
• How?
• Transferring the VM images from an image repository to the
selected resource and by creating on-the-fly temporary images

• More detail
• What is image?
VMs are supported by a set of virtual disks or images, which
contains the OS and any other additional software needed by the
VM.

• Image management model

4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 12

Image Management Model

(openNebula)

Image(orginal)
Image(clone)
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 13

• Image Repository refer to any storage medium, local or

remote, that hold the base images of the VMs. An image
repository can be a dedicated file server or a remote URL
from an appliance provider, but they need to be
accessible from the OpenNebula front-end.

• Front-end, executes the OpenNebula services

• Virtual Machine Directory is a directory on the cluster

node where a VM is running. This directory holds all
deployment files for the hypervisor to boot the machine,
checkpoints, and images being used or saved—all of
them specific to that VM. This directory should be shared
for most hypervisors to be able to perform live migrations.
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 14

Image Life cycle:

• Preparation implies all the necessary changes to be made
to the machine’s image so it is prepared to offer the
service to which it is intended.
• Cloning the image means taking the image from the
repository and placing it in the VM’s directory in the
physical node where it is going to be run before the VM is
actually booted
• Save/remove. If the save qualifier is disabled, once the
VM has been shut down, the images and all the changes
thereof are going to be disposed of. However, if the save
qualifier is activated, the image will be saved for later use.
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 15

Networking
• How?
• creating local area networks (LAN) to interconnect the VMs and
tracking the MAC addresses leased in each network.

• More detail
• virtual application network (VAN)
• the primary link between VMs
• OpenNebula dynamically creates VANs
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 16

Networking Model (OpenNebula)

4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 17

Three different VANs can be distinguished as follows:

• One is mapped on top of the public Internet
network, and we can see a couple of virtual machines
taking advantage of it. Therefore, these two VMs will
have access to the Internet.

• The other two are mapped on top of the private

physical network: The Red and Blue VANs. Virtual
machines connected to the same private VAN will be
able to communicate with each other, otherwise they
will be isolated and won’t be able to communicate.
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 18

CAPACITY MANAGEMENT
TO MEET SLA
COMMITMENTS
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 19

SLA Commitment
• Cloud consumer vs. End users
• SLA between Service owner and end user
• High-Level SLA
• SLA between Cloud provider and Service owner
• Cloud provider task
• Elasticity on demand
• Problem
• Application specific metric for resource allocation
• Solution
• Elasticity of the application should be contracted and formalized as
part of capacity availability SLA between the cloud provider and
service owner (RESERVOIR)
• Research issues
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 20

Infrastructure SLAs
• Main approaches:
• No SLAs
• Premises
• Spare capacity
• QoS-insensitive
• Suitable for best-effort workloads
• Probabilistic SLAs
• Availability percentile
• Less stringent commitment
• Lower availability = cheaper cost
• Suitable Small and medium business
• Deterministic SLAs
• 100% availability percentile
• Most stringent guarantee
• Suitable for Critical services
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 21

Elasticity rules
• Definition
• Scaling and de-scaling policies
• Motivation
• Pay-as-you-go billing
• Types
• Time driven
• Timer event
• Predictable workload
• OS Level Metric driven
• OS parameter, auto scaling
• Not precise
• Application Metric driven
• Application specific policies
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II 22

There are three types of elasticity rules:

• Time-driven: These rules change the virtual resources

array in response to a timer event. These rules are useful
for predictable workload

• OS Level Metrics-Driven: These rules react on predicates

defined in terms of the OS parameters (see Amazon
Auto-scaling Service).
• • Application Metrics-Driven: This is a unique
RESERVOIR offering that allows an application to supply
application-specific.
4 November 2012 Cloud Computing - Part II

END
On The Management of Virtual Machines for Cloud
Infrastructures
23