Design and Implementation of the

Workflow of an Academic Cloud

Abhishek Gupta, Jatin Kumar, Daniel J Mathew,

Sorav Bansal, Subhashis Banerjee, Huzur Saran

IIT Delhi

Introduction

Why move to the cloud?

Lower cost

Higher utilization of computing resources

Ease of management

Why have a private cloud?

Privacy

Security

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A Typical Academic Scenario

IIT Delhi

8000 students

450 faculty members

1000+ workstations

Many labs and server rooms across campus

Issues

High costs: hardware, power, management

Required: consolidation

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Requirements for an IaaS Academic Cloud

Workflow: should be simple and usable by all

Cost and configurability: ideal if open source

Performance: both compute and I/O performance are

required

Maximize resource utilization

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Currently Available Private Cloud Solutions

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

Familiarity with both Ubuntu and Eucalyptus required

Documentation is insufficient

Not highly customizable

Eucalyptus does provide a API …

VMWare vCloud

One of the most stable cloud platforms, but…

Licensing costs are very high

These private cloud solutions are for enterprise use; what

about an academic setup?

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Baadal: Overview

Baadal = cloud (in Hindi)

Technology stack

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Baadal

Web2py

Libvirt

Hypervisor Layer

Blade Server

Baadal: Components

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Baadal: Workflow

Step 1: User logs in

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Baadal: Workflow

Step 2:

User gives the

specifications of the VM: name,

operating system template and

RAM.

He also specifies a

faculty member who will

approve this request.

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Baadal: Workflow

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Step 3:

Faculty member logs in. He approves/rejects the requests that

have queued up till then. This request now goes to the data

center administrators who will give the final approval.

Baadal: Workflow

Step 4:

Data center administrator logs in. He appropriately approves,

modifies or rejects the requests approved by faculty.

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Baadal: Workflow

Step 5:

Once the request is approved, an appropriate host is

selected.

Step 6:

A pre-installed template with the required OS and

software is deployed to the selected host. A new port

on the perimeter server is forwarded to the VNC port

of the newly created VM. A VNC password is also

configured.

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Baadal: Workflow

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Step 7: The connection details (IP address, VNC port and

password) are sent to the user.

Cost Model and over-provisioning

Gold (1:1), Silver (1:2), Bronze (1:4) and Shutdown

Users are expected to switch levels while the machine is

running; no reboot required

Users are charged accordingly

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Scheduler

On runlevel change, a VM is live-migrated to an

appropriate host

Greedy scheduling strategy used to find new host

On spawning/starting a VM our algorithm assigns an

appropriate host

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Perimeter server

Fixed IP:port combination not possible due to migrations

Perimeter server maps user ports to actual IP:port

combinations using iptables to do packet forwarding

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With granularity of day, week and month to influence user’s

choice of runlevel

Performance Graphs

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Other Features

Wake-On-Lan

Task Queues

Support for multiple datastores

Automated emails/reminders

Storage-specific plugins to optimize operations

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Baadal: Infrastructure

32 blade servers each with 2x6 core Intel® Xeon® CPU

X5670 @ 2.93GHz and 16 GB RAM

16 blade servers each with 2x4 core Intel® Xeon® CPU

E5540 @ 2.53GHz and 12 GB RAM

A 10Gbps Ethernet backbone

50 TB of virtualized storage based on a NetApp 3210V NAS

and HP EVA6400 SAN with FC disks

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Baadal: Performance

Test1 KVM + Desktop2 KVM + Server3 VMWare + Server4

Empty loop

(10,000,000)

21840 us 44321 us 44553 us

Fork (1,000,000) 29.72s 6.88s 3.97s

wget (685.29MB) 54.09s 20.36s 9.5s

cp (685.29MB) 71.97s 11.65s 26.07s

iscp (685.29MB) 29.64s 52.34s 4.75s

oscp (685.29MB) 73.54s 83.68s 4.86s

Ping hypervisor 0.2886s 0.3712s 0.1204s

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1. Each VMs is allocated 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU and a 10 GB hard disk.

2. Desktops used are lab machines with typical configuration as 4GB RAM, C2D, 500GB hard disk

on a 1Gbps Ethernet

3. KVM + Server refers to KVM hypervisor running on HP Proliant BL460cG7 (16GB RAM, 24

CPU, 10Gbps Ethernet)

4. VMWare + Server refers to VMWare as hypervisor running on Dell PowerEdge R710 (24GB

RAM, 16 CPU, 10Gbps Ethernet)

Changes to Baadal [by CSC@IITD]

We are not handing over the port number for connecting to

the VNC server due to network traffic issues and also most of

the Linux users can use SSH and Windows users can use

Remote Desktop from inside Windows. But we have kept VNC

ports for administration purposes.

We are using Kerberos for back-end authentication; it can be

easily replaced by any other authentication mechanism using

inbuilt Web2py authentication modules.

Faculty/students in the admin team have two roles i.e. normal

user and administrator, which they can switch between.

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Future Work: Community-based Cloud

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Can be used to put under-utilized resources like lab

machines to good use

Challenges

Reliability

Network and storage topology

Scheduling

Solution for high reliability: record-replay

Already implemented successfully in Linux/KVM

References

1. Laor Kivity, Kamay, Lublin, and Liguori. KVM: The Linux Virtual

Machine Monitor. Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O.

Intel Technology Journal, 10:225-230, July 2007.

2. Libvirt, the virtualization API. http://www.libvirt.org.

3. Massimo DiPierro. Web2py Enterprise Web Framework, 2nd

Ed. Wiley Publishing, 2nd edition, 2009.

4. Ubuntu enterprise cloud - overview.

http://www.ubuntu.com/business/cloud/overview.

5. VMWare vCloud Director - deliver infrastructure as a

service without compromise.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-

director/features.html.

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Thank You

Questions?