Designing a Flexible and Modular Architecture for a Private Cloud: a Case Study
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235909611 Designing a flexible and modular architecture for a private cloud: A case study Conference Paper · June 2012 DOI: 10.1145/2287056.2287067 CITATIONS READS 6 53 2 authors: Valeria Cardellini Stefano Iannucci University of Rome Tor Vergata Mississippi State University 108 PUBLICATIONS 2,711 CITATIONS 21 PUBLICATIONS 238 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Workshop on Container-based Systems for Big data, Distributed and Parallel computing (CBDP’2018) View project Autonomic Solutions for Parallel and Distributed Data Stream Processing (Auto-DaSP) View project All content following this page was uploaded by Stefano Iannucci on 17 March 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Designing a Flexible and Modular Architecture for a Private Cloud: a Case Study Valeria Cardellini Stefano Iannucci University of Roma “Tor Vergata” University of Roma “Tor Vergata” [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT and medium organizations are attracted by this computing Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm used by an in- paradigm because it let them not to own an in-house data- creasingly number of enterprises to support their business center with the associated risks and costs but rather to just and promises to make the utility computing model fully re- rent what it is effectively needed time after time. alized by exploiting virtualization technologies. Free soft- There are different types of clouds, each with its own bene- ware is now mature not only to offer well-known server-side fits and drawbacks. With public clouds, providers offer their applications, but also to land on desktop computers. How- resources as services to the general public. Key benefits ever, administering in a decentralized way a large amount of using public clouds include no initial capital investment of desktop computers represents a demanding issue: system on the infrastructure and risk shifting to cloud providers. updates, backups, access policies, etc. are hard tasks to be Private clouds are designed for exclusive use by a single or- managed separately on each computer. This paper presents ganization. They may be built by the organization itself or a general purpose architecture for building a reliable, scal- by an external service provider. A private cloud offers the able, flexible, and modular private cloud that exploits vir- highest degree of control over performance, reliability, and tualization technologies at different levels. The architecture security. However, it is often criticized for being similar to can be used to offer a variety of services that span from web traditional proprietary server farms and does not provide applications and web services to soft real-time applications. benefits such as no up-front capital costs. Finally, hybrid To show the features of the proposed architecture, we also clouds are in between public and private: they are primarily present the design and implementation over it of a Linux based on private clouds, but they can extend their capacity Terminal Server Project (LTSP) cluster that benefits from with public clouds should the need arise. the underlying IaaS services offered by the private cloud. Cloud providers offer services at three different layers, re- The cloud infrastructure, as well as the LTSP, have been spectively named: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Plat- implemented exclusively using free software and are now in form as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) [11]. a production state, being used by approximately 200 users These three levels offer a layered view of the cloud computing for their everyday work. We hope that our description and stack. The user of the lowest layer rents from a IaaS provider design decisions can provide some guidance about designing virtualized resources like computational power, storage, and an architecture for a cloud service provider. network and has the task to manage the rented resources. The middle layer is the PaaS, in which the cloud user ac- quires the control over a software platform, ideally an appli- Categories and Subject Descriptors cation server and an application development environment, D.4.7 [Operating Systems]: Organization and Design— where he has to deploy and manage his own applications. Distributed Systems At the uppermost layer, i.e., the SaaS, the cloud provider offers software applications to its users. Keywords Virtualization technologies are at the basis of any cloud infrastructure because they enable a more efficient and flex- Private cloud, storage, virtualization ible management of the infrastructure itself. Different kinds of virtualization techniques are often used in a cloud envi- 1. INTRODUCTION ronment [6]. Server virtualization is employed when one or Cloud computing has recently emerged as a paradigm for more virtual machines (VMs) are placed on a single phys- delivering computational services over the Internet. Small ical server. The resulting benefits are not only to incre- ment servers utilization and lower power consumption in most cases, but also to improve flexibility, because virtu- alization unique features such as VMs live migration can be Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for exploited. With storage virtualization logical volumes are personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are built on top of raw block devices. Logical volumes virtual- not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies ize physical storage by offering an added level of indirection bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to in the storage stack, managed by a software layer. Network republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific virtualization aims at providing multiple overlay networks permission and/or a fee. VTDC’12, June 18, 2012, Delft, The Netherlands. on top of a shared physical network infrastructure, there- Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1344-5/12/06 ...$10.00. fore shifting every configuration issue from the underlying gateway to storage facilities, the back-end subnet also offers physical devices to more flexible software components. Fi- a centralized management of the services provided by the nally, we refer to desktop virtualization as the consolidation front-end subnet to the end users. of multiple desktop machines into one or more servers that are often built on top of a virtualization stack and are ac- 3. BACK-END SUBNET cessible by cheap terminals named thin clients. We have designed the back-end subnet in such a way to In this paper we propose a system architecture for a IaaS obtain a clear separation between the services offered to the private cloud which exploits all the virtualization techniques end users and the hardware/software needed by those ser- exposed so far. It has been designed with modularity, exten- vices. The basic idea is as follows: a service is just an appli- sibility, and dependability in mind and aims to be general cation that performs a task required by an end user, where purpose, that is, it is not restricted to any particular use case each application requires several system resources (CPU, or service. Therefore, it can be used by enterprises to host memory, disk, and network) with different needs. These any kind of applications, ranging from web services without resources have to be assigned by the system administrator any performance requirement to soft real-time applications in an transparent way with respect to the users, whose ex- with time constraints. To achieve such a flexibility we have pectation is to have a fully functional service without taking introduced a decoupling layer between the computational care of their administrative issues. Therefore, the back-end and storage resources and the possibility to homogeneously subnet goal is to provide all the basic infrastructure facilities, manage both virtualized and non-virtualized environments. such as a redundant storage management and a highly avail- For example, we can host web services on a virtual machine able management of computational resources, that should be on a shared virtualization host with a disk on shared stor- managed as much as possible through a centralized tool to age, as well as a real-time application on a dedicated physical facilitate the system administrator tasks. In the following, machine with a disk on dedicated storage. we analyze each component of the back-end subnet. The proposed architecture takes into account different needs of a IaaS provider: we aim at building an infrastruc- 3.1 Redundant Network Topology ture that can be reliable, scalable, easily manageable and A basic requirement of every dependable infrastructure is flexible. Indeed, on the storage side, it offers different kinds a dependable network topology. We introduce a redundant of replication, volume management, and easy asynchronous network topology that can (i) scale according to the num- backups; on the network side, it is based on a redundant ber of used physical links and (ii) automatically re-arrange network topology in order to maximize both availability and itself by excluding malfunctioning links without any service throughput; on the computational side, it merges together interruption. The presented topology is generic and does different virtualization technologies and physical machines. not depend on the physical medium used to implement it: We have implemented the proposed architecture using therefore, it is possible to use links based on Fiber Channel only free software. To show its effectiveness, we have re- over optical fiber or Ethernet links on copper cables. alized over it a Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) clus- Left side of Figure 1 shows the components belonging to ter: a terminal server for Linux that allows many people to the back-end subnet. There are two storage subsystems (pri- simultaneously use the same computer using low-powered mary and replica) and two highly available storage gateways, thin clients, that is, a desktop virtualization solution.