16-03-2011, 10:58 AM
presented by:
Norman Wilde
Thomas Huber
20090911_VirtualizationAndCloud.ppt (Size: 532.5 KB / Downloads: 428)
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
An opening caveat ...
This talk is based on speeches at conferences, discussions with people in industry, and some experimentation.
A lot of people think they will make a lot of money – so there is lots of hype!
But there seems to be something fundamental going on.
Two Technologies for Agility
Virtualization:
The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system and share the underlying hardware resources*
Cloud Computing:
“The provisioning of services in a timely (near on instant), on-demand manner, to allow the scaling up and down of resources”*
The Traditional Server Concept
And if something goes wrong ...
The Traditional Server Concept
System Administrators often talk about servers as a whole unit that includes the hardware, the OS, the storage, and the applications.
Servers are often referred to by their function i.e. the Exchange server, the SQL server, the File server, etc.
If the File server fills up, or the Exchange server becomes overtaxed, then the System Administrators must add in a new server.
The Traditional Server Concept
Unless there are multiple servers, if a service experiences a hardware failure, then the service is down.
System Admins can implement clusters of servers to make them more fault tolerant. However, even clusters have limits on their scalability, and not all applications work in a clustered environment.
The Traditional Server Concept
Pros
Easy to conceptualize
Fairly easy to deploy
Easy to backup
Virtually any application/service can be run from this type of setup
Cons
Expensive to acquire and maintain hardware
Not very scalable
Difficult to replicate
Redundancy is difficult to implement
Vulnerable to hardware outages
In many cases, processor is under-utilized
The Virtual Server Concept
Close-up*
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers seek to encapsulate the server software away from the hardware
This includes the OS, the applications, and the storage for that server.
Servers end up as mere files stored on a physical box, or in enterprise storage.
A virtual server can be serviced by one or more hosts, and one host may house more than one virtual server.
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers can still be referred to by their function i.e. email server, database server, etc.
If the environment is built correctly, virtual servers will not be affected by the loss of a host.
Hosts may be removed and introduced almost at will to accommodate maintenance.
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers can be scaled out easily.
If the administrators find that the resources supporting a virtual server are being taxed too much, they can adjust the amount of resources allocated to that virtual server
Server templates can be created in a virtual environment to be used to create multiple, identical virtual servers
Virtual servers themselves can be migrated from host to host almost at will.
The Virtual Server Concept
Pros
Resource pooling
Highly redundant
Highly available
Rapidly deploy new servers
Easy to deploy
Reconfigurable while services are running
Optimizes physical resources by doing more with less
Cons
Slightly harder to conceptualize
Slightly more costly (must buy hardware, OS, Apps, and now the abstraction layer)
Virtualization Status
Offerings from many companies
e.g. VMware, Microsoft, Sun, ...
Hardware support
Fits well with the move to 64 bit (very large memories) multi-core (concurrency) processors.
Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) provides hardware to support the Virtual Machine Monitor layer
Virtualization is now a well-established technology
So what about Cloud Computing?
Suppose you are Forbes.com
You offer on-line real time stock market data
Why pay for capacity weekends, overnight?
Forbes' Solution
Host the web site in Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud
Provision new servers every day, and deprovision them every night
Pay just $0.10* per server per hour
* more for higher capacity servers
Let Amazon worry about the hardware!
Cloud computing takes virtualization to the next step
You don’t have to own the hardware
You “rent” it as needed from a cloud
There are public clouds
e.g. Amazon EC2, and now many others (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and others ...)
A company can create a private one
With more control over security, etc.
Goal 1 – Cost Control
Cost
Many systems have variable demands
Batch processing (e.g. New York Times)
Web sites with peaks (e.g. Forbes)
Startups with unknown demand (e.g. the Cash for Clunkers program)
Reduce risk
Don't need to buy hardware until you need it
Goal 2 - Business Agility
More than scalability - elasticity!
Ely Lilly in rapidly changing health care business
Used to take 3 - 4 months to give a department a server cluster, then they would hoard it!
Using EC2, about 5 minutes!
And they give it back when they are done!
Scaling back is as important as scaling up
Goal 3 - Stick to Our Business
Most companies don't WANT to do system administration
Forbes says:
We are is a publishing company, not a software company
But beware:
Do you really save much on sys admin?
You don't have the hardware, but you still need to manage the OS!
How Cloud Computing Works
Various providers let you create virtual servers
Set up an account, perhaps just with a credit card
You create virtual servers ("virtualization")
Choose the OS and software each "instance" will have
It will run on a large server farm located somewhere
You can instantiate more on a few minutes' notice
You can shut down instances in a minute or so
They send you a bill for what you use
Any Nasty Details?
(loads of them!)
How do I pick a provider?
Am I locked in to a provider?
Where do I put my data?
What happens to my data when I shut down?
How do I log in to my server?
How do I keep others from logging in (security)?
How do I get an IP address?
Etc.
And One Really Important Caveat*
(footnote)
How come Amazon?
Grew out of efforts to manage Amazon’s own services
(Each time you get a page from Amazon, over a hundred servers are involved)
See reference Amazon Architecture on their service design concepts
They got so good at it that they launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a product
Cloud Computing Status
Seems to be rapidly becoming a mainstream practice
Numerous providers
Amazon EC2 imitators ...
Just about every major industry name
IBM, Sun, Microsoft, ...
Major buzz at industry meetings
So What’s the Take-Away?
There seems to be a major revolution underway in how we manage hardware
Specify (machine per service or one big machine with many virtual servers
Purchase (own it yourself or rent from a public cloud)
Use (always-on, or flexible provisioning as needed ...)
We may need to rethink both our research and teaching
For UWF:
What About Research?
The Eucalyptus Project
From University of California Santa Barbara
An open source collection of tools to build your own cloud
Linux using Xen for virtualization
An apparently open research area: handling data
Regular databases apparently don't scale well
Especially hard to make elastic (scale up / scale down)
For UWF:
What About Teaching?
Our graduates should know about cloud computing / virtualization
It will be useful for some applications, though not for all
But what are the right learning objectives?
Awareness (its there ...)
Mechanics (here’s how to instantiate a server ...)
Design (how to make a scalable service ...)
?
For Fall 2009 ...
Currently developing a Virtualization / Cloud Computing “module”
1 – 2 class sessions plus an exercise
Target courses (November):
COP 6990 – Multi-Process Computing (Simmons)
CTS 4817 – Web Server Administration (Owsnicki-Klewe)
Objectives
Awareness and mechanics of EC2
Norman Wilde
Thomas Huber
20090911_VirtualizationAndCloud.ppt (Size: 532.5 KB / Downloads: 428)
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
An opening caveat ...
This talk is based on speeches at conferences, discussions with people in industry, and some experimentation.
A lot of people think they will make a lot of money – so there is lots of hype!
But there seems to be something fundamental going on.
Two Technologies for Agility
Virtualization:
The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system and share the underlying hardware resources*
Cloud Computing:
“The provisioning of services in a timely (near on instant), on-demand manner, to allow the scaling up and down of resources”*
The Traditional Server Concept
And if something goes wrong ...
The Traditional Server Concept
System Administrators often talk about servers as a whole unit that includes the hardware, the OS, the storage, and the applications.
Servers are often referred to by their function i.e. the Exchange server, the SQL server, the File server, etc.
If the File server fills up, or the Exchange server becomes overtaxed, then the System Administrators must add in a new server.
The Traditional Server Concept
Unless there are multiple servers, if a service experiences a hardware failure, then the service is down.
System Admins can implement clusters of servers to make them more fault tolerant. However, even clusters have limits on their scalability, and not all applications work in a clustered environment.
The Traditional Server Concept
Pros
Easy to conceptualize
Fairly easy to deploy
Easy to backup
Virtually any application/service can be run from this type of setup
Cons
Expensive to acquire and maintain hardware
Not very scalable
Difficult to replicate
Redundancy is difficult to implement
Vulnerable to hardware outages
In many cases, processor is under-utilized
The Virtual Server Concept
Close-up*
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers seek to encapsulate the server software away from the hardware
This includes the OS, the applications, and the storage for that server.
Servers end up as mere files stored on a physical box, or in enterprise storage.
A virtual server can be serviced by one or more hosts, and one host may house more than one virtual server.
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers can still be referred to by their function i.e. email server, database server, etc.
If the environment is built correctly, virtual servers will not be affected by the loss of a host.
Hosts may be removed and introduced almost at will to accommodate maintenance.
The Virtual Server Concept
Virtual servers can be scaled out easily.
If the administrators find that the resources supporting a virtual server are being taxed too much, they can adjust the amount of resources allocated to that virtual server
Server templates can be created in a virtual environment to be used to create multiple, identical virtual servers
Virtual servers themselves can be migrated from host to host almost at will.
The Virtual Server Concept
Pros
Resource pooling
Highly redundant
Highly available
Rapidly deploy new servers
Easy to deploy
Reconfigurable while services are running
Optimizes physical resources by doing more with less
Cons
Slightly harder to conceptualize
Slightly more costly (must buy hardware, OS, Apps, and now the abstraction layer)
Virtualization Status
Offerings from many companies
e.g. VMware, Microsoft, Sun, ...
Hardware support
Fits well with the move to 64 bit (very large memories) multi-core (concurrency) processors.
Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) provides hardware to support the Virtual Machine Monitor layer
Virtualization is now a well-established technology
So what about Cloud Computing?
Suppose you are Forbes.com
You offer on-line real time stock market data
Why pay for capacity weekends, overnight?
Forbes' Solution
Host the web site in Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud
Provision new servers every day, and deprovision them every night
Pay just $0.10* per server per hour
* more for higher capacity servers
Let Amazon worry about the hardware!
Cloud computing takes virtualization to the next step
You don’t have to own the hardware
You “rent” it as needed from a cloud
There are public clouds
e.g. Amazon EC2, and now many others (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and others ...)
A company can create a private one
With more control over security, etc.
Goal 1 – Cost Control
Cost
Many systems have variable demands
Batch processing (e.g. New York Times)
Web sites with peaks (e.g. Forbes)
Startups with unknown demand (e.g. the Cash for Clunkers program)
Reduce risk
Don't need to buy hardware until you need it
Goal 2 - Business Agility
More than scalability - elasticity!
Ely Lilly in rapidly changing health care business
Used to take 3 - 4 months to give a department a server cluster, then they would hoard it!
Using EC2, about 5 minutes!
And they give it back when they are done!
Scaling back is as important as scaling up
Goal 3 - Stick to Our Business
Most companies don't WANT to do system administration
Forbes says:
We are is a publishing company, not a software company
But beware:
Do you really save much on sys admin?
You don't have the hardware, but you still need to manage the OS!
How Cloud Computing Works
Various providers let you create virtual servers
Set up an account, perhaps just with a credit card
You create virtual servers ("virtualization")
Choose the OS and software each "instance" will have
It will run on a large server farm located somewhere
You can instantiate more on a few minutes' notice
You can shut down instances in a minute or so
They send you a bill for what you use
Any Nasty Details?
(loads of them!)
How do I pick a provider?
Am I locked in to a provider?
Where do I put my data?
What happens to my data when I shut down?
How do I log in to my server?
How do I keep others from logging in (security)?
How do I get an IP address?
Etc.
And One Really Important Caveat*
(footnote)
How come Amazon?
Grew out of efforts to manage Amazon’s own services
(Each time you get a page from Amazon, over a hundred servers are involved)
See reference Amazon Architecture on their service design concepts
They got so good at it that they launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a product
Cloud Computing Status
Seems to be rapidly becoming a mainstream practice
Numerous providers
Amazon EC2 imitators ...
Just about every major industry name
IBM, Sun, Microsoft, ...
Major buzz at industry meetings
So What’s the Take-Away?
There seems to be a major revolution underway in how we manage hardware
Specify (machine per service or one big machine with many virtual servers
Purchase (own it yourself or rent from a public cloud)
Use (always-on, or flexible provisioning as needed ...)
We may need to rethink both our research and teaching
For UWF:
What About Research?
The Eucalyptus Project
From University of California Santa Barbara
An open source collection of tools to build your own cloud
Linux using Xen for virtualization
An apparently open research area: handling data
Regular databases apparently don't scale well
Especially hard to make elastic (scale up / scale down)
For UWF:
What About Teaching?
Our graduates should know about cloud computing / virtualization
It will be useful for some applications, though not for all
But what are the right learning objectives?
Awareness (its there ...)
Mechanics (here’s how to instantiate a server ...)
Design (how to make a scalable service ...)
?
For Fall 2009 ...
Currently developing a Virtualization / Cloud Computing “module”
1 – 2 class sessions plus an exercise
Target courses (November):
COP 6990 – Multi-Process Computing (Simmons)
CTS 4817 – Web Server Administration (Owsnicki-Klewe)
Objectives
Awareness and mechanics of EC2