An Open Source Solution for Virtual Infrastructure Management in Private and Hybrid Clouds

More often than not, a “cloud” refers to an “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) cloud, such as Amazon EC2, where IT infrastructure is deployed in a cloud provider’s datacenter in the form of virtual machines. With the growing popularity of IaaS clouds, an ecosystem of tools and technologies is emerging that can transform an organization’s existing infrastructure into a private cloud or a hybrid cloud. In this article, we present OpenNebula, an open source virtual infrastructure manager that can be used to deploy virtualized services on both a local pool of resources and on external IaaS clouds, and Haizea, a resource lease manager that can act as a scheduling backend for OpenNebula providing features not found in other cloud software or virtualization-based datacenter management software, such as advance reservations and resource preemption, which we argue to be specially relevant for private and hybrid clouds. Index Terms C.0.a Emerging technologies, D.4.7.b Distributed systems Cloud Computing is, to use yet another cloud-inspired pun, a nebulously defined term. However, it was arguably first popularized in 2006 by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2, see http://www.amazon.com/ec2/), which started offering virtual machines (VMs) for $0.10/hour using both a simple web interface and a programmerfriendly API. Although not the first to propose a utility computing model, Amazon EC2 contributed to popularizing the “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) paradigm, which became closely tied to the notion of Cloud Computing. An IaaS cloud enables on-demand provisioning of computational resources, in the form of VMs deployed in a cloud provider’s datacenter (such as Amazon’s), minimizing or even eliminating associated capital costs for cloud consumers, allowing capacity to be added or removed from their IT infrastructure in order to meet peak or fluctuating service demands, while only paying for the actual capacity used. Over time, an ecosystem of providers, users, and technologies has coalesced around this IaaS cloud model. More IaaS cloud providers, such as GoGrid, FlexiScale, and ElasticHosts have emerged. A growing number of Borja Sotomayor is with the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL, USA) Rubén S. Montero and Ignacio M. Llorente are with the Facultad de Informática of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Madrid, Spain) Ian Foster is with the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL, USA) and Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, IL, USA)