Network world and cloud computing

Vadim Truksha, an IT infrastructure designer at software company Altoros Systems, published an article in the United States on The Cyberworld. Compare this article with four cloud platforms, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, vCloud Director and OpenStack, for a brief analysis. The article is as follows:

Considering cloud computing has great potential to improve efficiency, its significant low cost, scalable infrastructure and high performance, as well as secure data storage, cloud computing has been one of the hottest topics in the IT space.

However, choosing the right cloud platform is difficult. These cloud platforms have support opinions and objections. So Truksha said that when a client asked me and my colleague what the 'best cloud platform' for his project was, 'we decided to drill down to some of the most prominent cloud platforms available and compare their capabilities And summarizes the results of the study in a product-by-product list. We tested four platforms, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, vCloud Director and OpenStack.

Below you will find out the features provided by the free and commercial cloud platforms, product prices, documentation integrity, and community maturity. In addition, the errors found during the deployment have been fixed by detailed instructions for fixing bugs.

The goal of this unbiased comparison is to help people align their business needs with the capabilities of a particular cloud system and ultimately choose the most appropriate product.

CloudStack 3.0.0

CloudStack is a console that manages data center computing resources. Many well-known information-driven companies such as Zynga, Nokia Research and Cloud Central have already deployed Cloud Cloud using CloudStack. In addition to having its own API (Application Programming Interface), this platform also supports CloudBridge Amazon EC2, which transforms an Amazon API into a CloudStack API. You can find a detailed list of supported instructions here. The URL is: http://docs.cloudstack.org/CloudBridge_Documentation/Supported_Amazon_EC2_Commands_in_CloudBridge

main feature:

- Does not depend on any hypervisor (KVM, XEN, ESXi, OVM and BareMetal)

- tasks (assign and manage permissions)

- virtual network (support for virtual LAN)

- Resource pool (lets administrators limit virtual resources, for example, by limiting the number of virtual machines created by one account and the number of public IP addresses assigned to one account, etc.)

- Snapshots and volumes

- Virtual Router, Firewall and Load Balancer

- Use host maintenance for dynamic migration

If your data center is based on vSphere, CloudStack will use a vCenter API. This means you will be able to manage data processing centers that are dynamically deployed with vSphere 4.1.

Price: CloudStack will be released free of charge under the GNU Public License v3 (GNU Public License Third Edition). To get paid technical support, you should contact the developer by email.

Community: There is an online community that provides timely technical support free of charge. You can find many solutions to CloudStack issues in the forums. There is also an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel and everyone is welcome to ask questions.

Documentation: If you have a basic technical background, it's easy to install the CloudStack platform using the default settings. If you need more complicated installation, you will encounter some problems, because the documentation does not contain all the complex issues. This manual provides step-by-step instructions, but does not provide any information on how this platform will generally function.

Experience: We implemented the system installation and setup and experimented with VMware and KVM clusters. These hosts use CentOS 5.5 and CentOS 6.2. In addition, our engineering team connected the private cloud deployed with CloudStack to the RightScale Management Console. This platform is easy to install and perform tasks as expected.

Possibilities and Defects Patch: Some errors occur while running libvirtd when using CentOS 6. Add the following code in the /etc/cgconfig.conf file to solve this problem:

group virt {

cpu {

cpu.shares = 9216;

}

}

After entering this code, restart /etc/init.d/cgconfig and start libvirtd.

There are some problems with using this console on the web. One of the problems is that the vnc (virtual network computer) server treats 127.0.0.1 as the default address for this host. To check this issue, execute the following command:

netstat -nlp | grep kvm

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5900 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 11673 / qemu-kvm

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5901 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 11872 / qemu-kvm

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5902 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 15227 / qemu-kvm

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5903 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 12587 / qemu-kvm

Once this address is 127.0.0.1, you should uncomment this line with vnc_listen = "0.0.0.0" in the /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf configuration file and restart the virtual machine.

Conclusion: The engineering team using CloudStack Management Console was impressed with our engineering team. This is a rapidly evolving tool that offers a wide range of capabilities and is available for free. It can be used for production. However, if you use VMware hypervisor, vCloud Director seems to be the better choice.