Five major private cloud management products

If you want to create a private cloud, you need to use management software to create a virtual pool of computing resources, provide access to end users, and deal with security, resource allocation, tracking and billing issues.

We tested five mainstream private cloud management products: Novell's Cloud Manager,eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, Opennebula,citrix Lab Manager and Cloud.com's cloudstack, our test objective is simply to see if they are up to the current private cloud project, and by testing we find that Novell's cloud manager is the only one by one products with the functionality we need, so Cloud Manager is no doubt the winner of the test, we are frustrated with other products, and some products are not even ready. The following is an evaluation opinion for each independent product.

Private cloud construction is not an overnight, but a long-term construction process, thorns are not known. If you are not well prepared beforehand, after reading the results of this article, you may assume that the private cloud computing will be stranded. So we say, private cloud: Not for the timid.

Novell's Cloud Manager (CM) controls internal assets in the same way as the public cloud service provider, but not simply doctrine, Cloud Pret leaves a highly automated essence that allows private cloud builders to identify hardware assets, Centralize resource pooling on virtual servers, package applications, and then implement billing and tracking usage through the Active Directory and LDAP security model.





, like all tested products, requires a lot of preparation, such as allocating hardware and software resources, splitting it into recognizable components, and then allowing them to be accessed and tracked during the production phase lifecycle.





after the private cloud is built, Novell Cloud Manager has the most sophisticated approach to providing management, provisioning, and billing capabilities for cloud resources, and the end user is simple to operate, with two main control components: Cloud Manager Creator Server and cloud Manager Orchestration Server, we install it in a VMware 4.1 environment and use a SuSE 11 virtual machine (VM) for each service.





The initial configuration needs to be created using cm Orchestration Server (CMOS) as the Access library Vm,cmos contains components for creating custom VM instances (from Novell acquired Platespin).





We have CMOS agents installed on VMware's vcenter to achieve Novell and VMware docking, Novell Cloud Manager also supports bare-metal hypervisor Xen and Hyper-V, but we have not tested them.





configured (not a difficult process), Cloud Manager allows us to view cloud resources and impose restrictions on cloud resources, user authentication through the Active Directory or LDAP directory service, for cloud components, using preconfigured templates, These components are pre-installed and configured with the application's VM, each with its own vcpu, memory, storage and IP address, settings that can be locked and allowed to be modified, such as storage size/location or increased memory.




The
template must be placed on an NFS shared storage vcenter mount, and we tested it on Windows Server and SuSE Linux Enterprise SERVERVM without any trouble.




The billing/billing component of
Novell Cloud Manager has the flavor of a managed service provider (Consolidator services Provider,msp) that can view the monthly cost of each workload, including storage costs (per GB), VCPU, memory ( per MB) and network costs. For example, we can set the cost of $3 per month for each vcpu, and with this feature, we can track the various resources deployed and implement the billing, just like the public cloud resources that users buy from MSP or public cloud vendors.





Cloud Manager provides us with a complete private cloud management blueprint that allows you to build a private cloud platform from scratch and deliver it as a paid product service.





Citrix Lab Manager 3.9 and Self-Service portal





The Citrix Self-Service Portal (SSP) is not a stand-alone product, together with Citrix Lab Manager, which makes up the Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition, and Lab Manager is a resource manager and control system designed for XENSERVERVM. XenServer can transform the Lab Manager component into a cloud provisioning system through the role definition of the self-service portal, unlike Novell's cloud manager, self-service portals are designed for XenServer and can support Linux and Windows VMs.




The
Self-Service Portal Tracking report contains a lot of information, but it does not provide the required components for billing, it must be handled by an external package, XenServer 5.6 Platinum is required and is licensed by the server, regardless of how many processing cores the server contains. We installed XenServer, created an authorization server to assign Platinum licenses, then imported the Lab Manager Router VM template (which needs to be placed on shared storage), then installed the Postgres database and lab Manager on it, and after a few steps, We started all the VMS, and during that time we experienced a lot of headaches from Linux licensing virtual devices.





Cloud VM and SSP are used together, created from an ISO operating system image stored on our server, we need to install the Client Agent for Lab Manager, and Windows and SLEs VMS work well. Within the SSP, we specify templates that define the roles that administrators and users have, as well as the VMS and resources they can deploy.





Lab Manager and SSP can connect to Active Directory or LDAP for user authentication, and user-owned roles have very detailed information within Lab Manager that can limit the amount of disk space and memory available to users.





test SSP, we successfully started a variety of Windows and Linux VM,VM including preconfigured applications, or just a raw operating system instance, from our use process, the SSP is very user-friendly.





Lab Manager's built-in reports are fairly detailed and contain a large amount of information, such as job name, start time, end time, RAM usage, storage usage, and so on, but do not provide related costs, as mentioned earlier, cost/billing is not an SSP responsibility. cloud.com Cloudstack 2.1.3





Cloud.com's cloudstack is simple and inflexible, and it uses a Management Server application that can be included on a VM or physical machine running red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 5.4+ 64-bit version , but Cloudstack is useful as a VM-mirrored repository that can be deployed in the cloud or in a cloud-like environment.





has a lot of preparation to do before deployment, and when you create a VM, you can't modify the amount of CPU, memory, or disk space, which means that the VM configuration is locked, so you need to know the potential configuration requirements before you create the VM.





we used the XenServer test Cloudstack, the official website claims to support KVM and VMware, but we didn't find the documentation, and then we were told to wait until 2.2 to get support, which is now in beta phase. Cloudstack Storage supports NFS and iSCSI, minimum 100GB of storage space, secondary storage requires at least one NFS share, primary storage can be iSCSI or another NFS storage system.




During the
test, we found some problems, first of all, it is difficult to modify the created VM, if you want to modify the VM configuration, only delete and then recreate, this is our most annoying problem.





second, it can go into the MySQL database to track cloud.com configuration, but cloud.com does not provide a database schema, according to the cloud.com spokesperson, the version that supports database access will soon be released.





Third, we tried two times to create a virtual machine instance, but both failed because there are not enough IP addresses available, and the user interface tells us that there are three VMS available, but in fact only one is available.





Usually, the user interface is beyond the "normal" range, for example, suppose a VM has been corrupted, by default there is a 24 hour retention time before the deletion, although the VM is not available, but it uses the IP address in this period is no longer available, if your IP address is not enough, That only waits until the VM is removed to assign the IP address it uses to the new VM, and if you have a lot of users who have scrambled the VM cloud resources, this is a problem that we recommend to consider before deploying.





Another limitation is that we cannot create any VMS on the XenServer node until we add a VM to the Cloud.com warehouse, because no discovery process discovers an existing/current VM, and if the VM is added to the XenServer node in advance, Cloudstack initialization will fail, resulting in the inability to continue configuration of Cloudstack.





We also found that we could not install the XenServer authorization server on the node, the authorization server must be on another machine or VM, the worst of which is not documented.





after a tedious installation, Cloudstack finally normally supports Windows and Linux VMS, Cloudstack relies on LDAP for security, and if needed, built-in users (not members of the directory service) can authenticate. Cloudstack can track each user, but does not display any relevant information in the Web user interface and can only be viewed through the Listusagerecords API call.





Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0.1





before we introduced the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), we had evaluated eucalyptus, and we were looking forward to the performance in the Enterprise Edition, Openeucalyptus is the cornerstone of all Eucalyptus versions, The Enterprise management component is similar to UEC, including cloud controllers, Walrus (specifically for Amazon S3 and similar storage designs), storage controllers (block types), and cluster controllers.





All components are installed on the Rhel 5.4+,centos 5.4+ or openSUSE 11.2+ bare metal, but this is not indicated in the document, because the document reference is not significant, when the installation of Enterprise Edition we like a bunch of Big bear, during this period, we found that the Windows Server support is unfriendly and there is no description. But Eucalyptus claims that their technicians do not have the slightest difficulty, although I believe them, but cloud components are so critical that relying on Eucalyptus's technical support staff always makes people feel bad.





during the installation process, we had to use some workaround, sometimes referencing the openeucalyptus documentation would be useful, and we were told that the management component needed a separate physical server when it was installed, so we had to do a lot of extra work.





then we created the mirror, created the instance using the same method as creating the UEC instance, including the binding instance, uploading and registering the instance, the existing VMware instance must be converted, and the Windows instance must undergo several stages of the conversion process. Errors at any one stage can cause hardware configuration errors, such as blue screens, to occur when the Windows Server instance starts.





Finally, it does not provide user authentication with links to LDAP or active directories, so user and admin logins are included in Enterprise Edition security, but we find it almost impassable.




Once the
installation is complete and working properly, you can use the conversion and registration instances, the Enterprise version of the Web user interface is a bit shabby, but it can well track the deployment of instances.





the only way to deploy a VM is to use the Euca-tools command line or other Amazon tools to deploy and reverse deploy instances with euca-run-instances. The euca-reboot-instances and Euca-terminate-instances commands are available to ordinary users, but developers and administrators must have a full grasp of their usage.





The only thing users and administrators can see on the Web interface are the mirrors they can use, as well as the login credentials (SSH key, key, query id,x.509 certificate, etc.) required by the command-line tools. Getting information about a running VM instance requires the Euca-describe-instances command, and other command-line tools are available. Unfortunately, there is no nice Web user interface to view admin instances, and shutting down or restarting an instance can only run commands.




The
Enterprise Web user interface generates reports such as system events, resources that have been used/deployed, and so on, which can be exported in multiple formats, such as Pdf,csv,excel or HTML. After you generate a Resource Usage report, you can see the storage or instance usage, including how much storage volume was used, how long it took (hours), and how many instances were created, which can be used for billing, although there is no built-in billing capability.





lack of documentation makes us almost mad, we have been debugging on eucalyptus for quite a long time, and if you are interested in the Enterprise version, we recommend that you purchase Eucalyptus technical support services.





Opennebula 2.0




Designed for Linux VMS,
Opennebula is a component of the open Cloud Community project, Opennebula and open core eucalyptus, which is completely open source.





Opennebula is especially suitable for developers and non-persistent (focus on job control) cloud VMs and for ordinary users, but requires an administrator with a mid-level Unix/linux/solaris skill to create and deploy a private cloud, Opennebula also provides a common cloud and mixed cloud options, but we focus on the private cloud.





Opennebula runs on Ubuntu 10.04 or CentOS 5.4+ (and most other Linux distributions are OK, but the Express installer is only available for both), the installation is completely scripted (no GUI) and requires a large number of text profiles.





Opennebula VM mirroring must be created as a KVM or Xen mirror prior to a scripted installation, although it also provides a VMware driver, but it needs to install the Libvirt API from source code, with a lot of extra work to do. Once we have created the mirror, we have to manually copy it to the location where the image is stored, and then create a profile and network description for the VM image.





using the onevnet command to add a network configuration, we use the ONEVM command to start an instance of the mirror in the same command-line environment, and a Linux server without any problems is just in front of us. We also tried to use the Windows Server 2008 VM in KVM, but unfortunately we couldn't start it with Opennebula, so it was ostensibly supporting windows, but there was no real guide.





-supported plug-ins include LDAP authentication (requires "Net-ldap" Ruby Gem), Billing (requires "sequel" Ruby Gem), VMware drivers, and Opennebula quick setup programs.





our VM on ESX 4.1 uses Ubuntu 10.04 as the front end and Ubuntu 10.04 as a node on another machine, and the Quick Setup program creates an NFS share for the node shared mirror on the front end.





everything is done on the command line, Opennebula has no web interface at all, and here are some of the most important commands you can use:





oneimage (Add/list/remove Mirror/save ISO file to warehouse/set mirror properties);





ONEVM (Create/delete/start/stop vm/other VM-related miscellaneous features);





Oneacct (obtain billing data for host/vm/user);





Onecluster (List/create/delete cluster);





onehost (Add/Remove/sync host);





oneuser (Create/delete/list user);





Onevnet (Create/Modify/delete virtual network).





Opennebula supports multiple authentication scenarios, including basic user name and password authentication (managing user information using Sqllite or MySQL database), and SSH key authentication, and a new LDAP plug-in, but we were unable to successfully authenticate using the Active Directory. Opennebula documentation also lacks solutions for related issues.





Opennebula also has a plugin to install the ONEACCT command, which allows you to view the running time of the instance, the operator, host, and other details that can be used for billing.





Opennebula's modular design makes it a brighter future, along with other open-source products that make it cheaper to create private cloud platforms, but Opennebula documents have a lot of work to do, and we want it to be synchronized with product updates.





Opennebula contains a number of useful tools, but its strengths are in the core tools, so it is suitable for developers and managers to use, ordinary users or remote view is advisable. Summary





Overall, the task of creating a private cloud platform using the tools we evaluate is daunting and requires a lot of upfront configuration, in addition to supporting various hypervisor, the idea of aggregating/materializing resource pools to make them easy to access and use throughout the life cycle of the instance.





Novell's cloud Manager is the best, and the native support billing, Citrix's Self-Service portal is built on Lab manager and requires XenServer, Cloud.com will provide better compatibility for its two products, but it is not conclusive because everything is still going on, we recommend Opennebula to developers and advanced system users, and finally the Enterprise version Eucalyptus,eucalyptus can control, but the enterprise version makes us very painful.





Maybe when you read the comments in this article, the private cloud plan that was originally conceived would run aground, indeed, the path of the private cloud is covered with thorns, but I prefer to compare it to a thorn rose, courageous, courageous, you will be successful, but if you are a submissive, timid, I just want to say, The private cloud is not for you.