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| = DoC Private Cloud = | ## page was renamed from internal/project/privatecloud = DoC Private Cloud: 2012 - 2013 = |
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| == Services == | == Project Goal == |
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| Initially, something like the following services will be needed: | In early summer 2012, CSG were tasked with building a DoC '''Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud, very like Amazon EC2''' ("Elastic Compute Service") which presents a ''secure and convenient web interface'' which enables users of DoC to ''specify and create VMs and associated storage, automatically install OSes on them and deploy them''. |
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| * Virtual-machine hosting / automated provisioning facility (Amazon EC20-a-like). * Persistent backing-store for VM images (perhaps Amazon S3-style, perhaps Amazon Elastic Block Service-style, perhaps distributed filesystem). * High-performance POSIX file-store access / scratch areas (perhaps in-cloud or perhaps separate from the cloud). |
The main goal is to virtualize most research servers, decoupling the OS image from the hardware for greater flexibility. Sharing (amortizing) the costs of each machine. One driver of this is EPSRC deciding to only provide 50% of any hardware bid over £10K in future, with the Dept expected to pay the remaining 50%. |
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| In relation to scalable storage options, we've already been thinking about these for a while; see also: [[internal/project/Storage-NG|Storage-NG]]. | This project was approved by Executive Committee and by two open meetings of Academic staff. Peter McBrien (PJM) led the project, and laid out two stages: |
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| Candidate software to investigate, solving all or part of the private iaas cloud problem, includes: | 1. a 6 month phase in which CSG (advised by an academic working group) will design and build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, possibly for 6 months in the first instance. The Department will spend some significant amount of money to build the prototype cloud, perhaps in the £100-200K range. |
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| * OpenStack: claims to do most of the job - VM provisioning, interface with KVM, Xen etc (subproject "Nova") and S3-alike storage system (project "Swift"). Also can integrate to (eg. Ceph, GlusterFS) for filesystem-based distributed storage. Also, Nova has an iSCSI client storage plugin too. | 2. assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers would then be encouraged to add research-funded hardware to the cloud and given some form of preferential treatment on "their hardware". All members of CSG are enthusiastic to gain cloud-related skills from the "Cloud Manager". |
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| * CloudStack: Citrix open source project, donated to Apache Foundation, rather similar to the above. | Most crucially: the Department's substantial initial investment '''had to be fully spent before the end of July 2012'''. This means that all kit was ordered, delivered and paid for before the 31st July 2012. Nearly £300K inc vat was spent on the project. The Cloud Manager, Thomas Joseph, was appointed about a year later: in July 2013. |
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| * VM seed/runtime image storage: * [[http://openstack.org/projects/storage/|OpenStack Swift]] distributed object store. (Implements Amazon S3 only) * [[http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/|Sheepdog]] distributed image storage. * High-performance distributed POSIX file-stores: * [[http://ceph.newdream.net/|Ceph]] distributed object store / block-device / filesystem. DWM evaluated: Conclusion - not ready yet. * [[http://www.gluster.org/|Gluster]] distributed filesystem. DWM evaluating. Looking rather promising. No "storage head node", i.e. bottleneck! * [[http://www.moosefs.org/|MooseFS]] distributed filesystem. * [[http://www.fhgfs.com/cms/|Fraunhofer Parallel File System]] distributed filesystem, no storage head node, BUT NO REPLICATION, pure striping. Discovered by SM. Conclusion: not suitable. |
== The Problem We're Trying to Solve == |
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| At present, the options for scalable high-performance general purpose NFS filers suitable for storing home dirs, research volumes etc are either expensive or not yet mature. The above POSIX filestores may well be suitable for the "inner problem" of VM storage. |
At present, research groups buy clusters when they have money, CSG set them up, install the current supported Linux or Windows release on them (the CSG supported Linux release currently changes each year), optionally configuring storage and fileserver nodes, arranging tape backups of important data, adding special software etc. |
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| Upgrading existing NFS fileservers to 10Gb is definitely also worth trying (first). | Then the servers age, after the first year the OS becomes essentially frozen apart from minor security updates. It's often difficult to persuade researchers that we should reinstall their fileservers, webservers and compute nodes. They become "fragile", and eventually a security risk. |
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| * Virtualization software: * [[http://www.xen.org/|Xen]] paravirtualization tools. * [[http://www.linux-kvm.org/|KVM]] (para)-virtualization tools. * VMware ESX virtualization software - commercial. * [[http://libvirt.org/|libvirt]] VM abstraction and management layer. * [[http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/|Ganeti]] VM management system. * [[http://openstack.org/projects/compute/|OpenStack Nova]] VM management system [uses Xen, KVM or VMware under the hood]. |
Sometimes it's hard to retire them when the hardware becomes more than 4-5 years old, because of the "fragile" software setup on them. |
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| The virtual-machine management layer will need to support accounting for resource utilization by the VMs spawned for a given user or group, live migration of VMs from one host to another, and will likely need to support automated backups / snapshots of at least SOME historical virtual-machine disk state. (Note that this differs from existing doctrine, which specifies that the machine-local OS data is expendable, and can be regenerated.) | A second problem is that these clusters are often only accessible by members of the specific research group that bought them, so the resource may not be fully utilised. |
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| The use of seed images, data de-duplication, and/or copy-on-write would also be valuable for minimising storage requirements. | Instead, the idea is to setup a private cloud, researchers add hardware to that cloud's core resources, then create a VM for each cluster node, perhaps tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, the creation process should automatically install a CSG-supported operating system (historically supported Linuxes and Windows versions) or a non-CSG supported "standalone" operating system on the new VM. Researchers work as before on each VM - but each node is encapsulated inside a VM. |
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| == Background == | Later, these VMs could share resources - when the group don't need 100% resources, or new more powerful hardware is purchased and the VM migrated to it. |
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| Sometime in early 2012, Susan told DCW that DoC were thinking of hiring someone for 6 months into CSG, specifically tasked with building a DoC private cloud. Essentially she said that Exec Committee has found some significant pot of money which needs to be spent this financial year. |
We would also gain to flexibility to create short-term VMs for specific "run this software on 16 nodes" experiments. A fleet of such short-term VMs might be created today, run for a couple of days, and then be destroyed at the end of the experiment. |
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| She explained the core idea was "virtualisation even for research clusters": at present, research groups buy clusters when they have money, CSG set them up, install "linux du jour" on them, configure fileservers (if part of cluster), tape backups (if part), processing node special software etc. |
We could even give every DoC user (students and staff!) their very own VM when they join, with full root/admin access - or at least the ability to create one when they first need it (lazy evaluation:-)). |
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| Then the servers age, the OS is essentially frozen (it's often difficult to persuade researchers that we should reinstall their fileservers, webservers and compute nodes). They become "fragile". Sometimes it's hard to even retire them on schedule (4/5/6 years or whatever). Also these clusters are often only accessible by members of that research group so the resource may not be fully utilised. |
== Open Staff cloud meetings == |
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| Susan's vision: setup a private cloud, researchers add hardware to that cloud's core resources, then create a VM for each cluster node, perhaps tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, CSG install that virtual cluster node's OS, researchers work as before - but each node is encapsulated inside a VM. Later, these VMs could share resources - when the group don't need 100% resources, or new more powerful hardware is purchased. |
In April 2012, the discussion was opened out to all interested staff, and (so far) two open staff cloud meetings have been held. Here are some notes taken by DCW and LDK of the discussions at both meetings. |
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| Various discussions with PJM and AON followed. Project will definitely proceed. In two stages: |
[[project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-03|Open Staff Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012]] |
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| 1. a 6 month phase to build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, either temporary or permanent. The Department will spend some significant amount of money, perhaps in the £100-200K range. | [[project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-25|Open Staff Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012]] |
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| 2. assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers then have the option of adding hardware to the cloud. All members of CSG will become skilled in cloud-related topics, and the "Cloud Manager" will do non-cloud-related problem solving too. | == Summer 2013: Cloud Access URL == |
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| Most crucially: (despite not knowing the exact spec, services to provide, let alone how to implement them) we therefore need to purchase all the kit having it delivered in July 2012, before the Olympics. PJM added "build a private cloud like Amazon EC2 does", AON suggested a budget of £100K, £150K or even £200K - we will provide possible plans for these price levels. |
The end-user interface for the DoC Private Cloud is now available for departmental users via [[http://cloudstack.doc.ic.ac.uk/client|cloudstack.doc.ic.ac.uk/client]]. Please use your normal college user-name and password for authentication; the domain should be ''imperial''. |
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| DWM has spent a lot of time evaluating Ceph as a possible S3/Elastic Block Store like storage system for supporting VM storage and possibly very high speed filesystems eg. staging areas for VM data (scaleout NAS with replication). So far: it's not there yet, at least as a fast POSIX filesystem. Alternatives need to be looked at as well.. |
== Summer 2012: Cloud Hardware we bought == |
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| == Staff Working Group meetings == | Here is the hardware we have bought for the cloud. More can be added later (eg. by research groups opting in): |
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| [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-03|Staff Working Group Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012]] | . 4 x Dell [[www.dell.com/uk/business/p/poweredge-c6220/pd|PowerEdge C6220]] compute servers. This is a very dense compute server, with four independent nodes in a two unit chassis. Each node contains two Intel Xeon E5-2690 8-core 2.9GHz processors (32 threads with hyper-threading), 128GB of RAM and two 1TB hard drives. . 2 x IBM [[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/uk/x/hardware/rack/x3750m4/|System x3750 M4]]. Each server has four Intel Xeon E5-4650 8-core 2.7GHz processors (64 threads with hyper-threading), 512GB of RAM, two 300GB hard drives and twelve 1TB hard-drives. . 4 x Dell [[www.dell.com/uk/enterprise/p/poweredge-r720/pd|PowerEdge R720]]. Each server has two Intel Xeon E5-2640 2.50GHz six-core 2.5Ghz processors (24 threads with hyper-threading), 64GB of RAM, two 300GB hard drives and 24 1TB hard-drives. . 1 x NetApp [[http://www.netapp.com/uk/products/storage-systems/fas2200/fas2200-product-comparison.aspx|NetApp F2240A-2]] dual-controller Filer and disk-shelf; raw storage capacity 60TB. . 4 x Extreme [[http://www.extremenetworks.com/products/summit-x670.aspx|Summit X670]] 10GbE switches; these form 2 pairs of switches, one pair in the DoC machine room (Huxley) and the other pair to be installed in the ICT machine room (MechEng). |
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| [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-25|Staff Working Group/Open Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012]] | We identified two types of server for the DoC private cloud: a ''compute node'' and a ''storage node'': * A '''compute node''' contains a large number of CPUs/cores. Its primary role in the cloud is one of computation (virtual machine hosting, distributed computing and the like). The Dell C6220 and IBM 3750s mentioned above are variant types of compute nodes. * A '''storage node''' contains a large number of locally attached disks providing a chunk of fault tolerant storage. Its primary role in the cloud is to provide storage (for VM images and associated research filesystems). The Dell R720s and the NetApp are both storage heavy nodes. We envisage that multiple compute nodes and multiple storage nodes would be needed. Here are our old notes: [[project/privatecloud/hardware|Hardware Investigations]] == Software Investigations == CSG have been familiarising themselves with various possible open source cloud or storage software systems that might be able to implement some/all of the required IaaS cloud services, and performing some initial investigations of a few of them. While the Cloud Manager will of course be responsible for designing and building the cloud, existing members of CSG are concerned to '''map the terrain''' to find out where the dragons are lurking and to provide an '''existence proof''' to reduce the risk that after buying the hardware, no software can be added to build the desired cloud. Here are our notes: [[project/privatecloud/investigations|Software Investigations]] |
DoC Private Cloud: 2012 - 2013
Project Goal
In early summer 2012, CSG were tasked with building a DoC Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud, very like Amazon EC2 ("Elastic Compute Service") which presents a secure and convenient web interface which enables users of DoC to specify and create VMs and associated storage, automatically install OSes on them and deploy them.
The main goal is to virtualize most research servers, decoupling the OS image from the hardware for greater flexibility. Sharing (amortizing) the costs of each machine. One driver of this is EPSRC deciding to only provide 50% of any hardware bid over £10K in future, with the Dept expected to pay the remaining 50%.
This project was approved by Executive Committee and by two open meetings of Academic staff. Peter McBrien (PJM) led the project, and laid out two stages:
- a 6 month phase in which CSG (advised by an academic working group) will design and build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, possibly for 6 months in the first instance. The Department will spend some significant amount of money to build the prototype cloud, perhaps in the £100-200K range.
- assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers would then be encouraged to add research-funded hardware to the cloud and given some form of preferential treatment on "their hardware". All members of CSG are enthusiastic to gain cloud-related skills from the "Cloud Manager".
Most crucially: the Department's substantial initial investment had to be fully spent before the end of July 2012. This means that all kit was ordered, delivered and paid for before the 31st July 2012. Nearly £300K inc vat was spent on the project. The Cloud Manager, Thomas Joseph, was appointed about a year later: in July 2013.
The Problem We're Trying to Solve
At present, research groups buy clusters when they have money, CSG set them up, install the current supported Linux or Windows release on them (the CSG supported Linux release currently changes each year), optionally configuring storage and fileserver nodes, arranging tape backups of important data, adding special software etc.
Then the servers age, after the first year the OS becomes essentially frozen apart from minor security updates. It's often difficult to persuade researchers that we should reinstall their fileservers, webservers and compute nodes. They become "fragile", and eventually a security risk.
Sometimes it's hard to retire them when the hardware becomes more than 4-5 years old, because of the "fragile" software setup on them.
A second problem is that these clusters are often only accessible by members of the specific research group that bought them, so the resource may not be fully utilised.
Instead, the idea is to setup a private cloud, researchers add hardware to that cloud's core resources, then create a VM for each cluster node, perhaps tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, the creation process should automatically install a CSG-supported operating system (historically supported Linuxes and Windows versions) or a non-CSG supported "standalone" operating system on the new VM. Researchers work as before on each VM - but each node is encapsulated inside a VM.
Later, these VMs could share resources - when the group don't need 100% resources, or new more powerful hardware is purchased and the VM migrated to it.
We would also gain to flexibility to create short-term VMs for specific "run this software on 16 nodes" experiments. A fleet of such short-term VMs might be created today, run for a couple of days, and then be destroyed at the end of the experiment.
We could even give every DoC user (students and staff!) their very own VM when they join, with full root/admin access - or at least the ability to create one when they first need it (lazy evaluation:-)).
Open Staff cloud meetings
In April 2012, the discussion was opened out to all interested staff, and (so far) two open staff cloud meetings have been held. Here are some notes taken by DCW and LDK of the discussions at both meetings.
Open Staff Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012
Open Staff Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012
Summer 2013: Cloud Access URL
The end-user interface for the DoC Private Cloud is now available for departmental users via cloudstack.doc.ic.ac.uk/client. Please use your normal college user-name and password for authentication; the domain should be imperial.
Summer 2012: Cloud Hardware we bought
Here is the hardware we have bought for the cloud. More can be added later (eg. by research groups opting in):
4 x Dell PowerEdge C6220 compute servers. This is a very dense compute server, with four independent nodes in a two unit chassis. Each node contains two Intel Xeon E5-2690 8-core 2.9GHz processors (32 threads with hyper-threading), 128GB of RAM and two 1TB hard drives.
2 x IBM System x3750 M4. Each server has four Intel Xeon E5-4650 8-core 2.7GHz processors (64 threads with hyper-threading), 512GB of RAM, two 300GB hard drives and twelve 1TB hard-drives.
4 x Dell PowerEdge R720. Each server has two Intel Xeon E5-2640 2.50GHz six-core 2.5Ghz processors (24 threads with hyper-threading), 64GB of RAM, two 300GB hard drives and 24 1TB hard-drives.
1 x NetApp NetApp F2240A-2 dual-controller Filer and disk-shelf; raw storage capacity 60TB.
4 x Extreme Summit X670 10GbE switches; these form 2 pairs of switches, one pair in the DoC machine room (Huxley) and the other pair to be installed in the ICT machine room (MechEng).
We identified two types of server for the DoC private cloud: a compute node and a storage node:
A compute node contains a large number of CPUs/cores. Its primary role in the cloud is one of computation (virtual machine hosting, distributed computing and the like). The Dell C6220 and IBM 3750s mentioned above are variant types of compute nodes.
A storage node contains a large number of locally attached disks providing a chunk of fault tolerant storage. Its primary role in the cloud is to provide storage (for VM images and associated research filesystems). The Dell R720s and the NetApp are both storage heavy nodes.
We envisage that multiple compute nodes and multiple storage nodes would be needed. Here are our old notes:
Software Investigations
CSG have been familiarising themselves with various possible open source cloud or storage software systems that might be able to implement some/all of the required IaaS cloud services, and performing some initial investigations of a few of them. While the Cloud Manager will of course be responsible for designing and building the cloud, existing members of CSG are concerned to map the terrain to find out where the dragons are lurking and to provide an existence proof to reduce the risk that after buying the hardware, no software can be added to build the desired cloud.
Here are our notes: