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Building your own Cloud with commodity hardware and "Ganeti"

by Pranjal Mittal (speaking)

Section
Infrastructure
Technical level
Intermediate

Objective

The goal of my talk is to highlight what it takes to setup your own cloud, compute clusters using an awesome open-source tool called Ganeti on commodity hardware.

Ganeti is a cluster - virtual server management software written in Python / Haskell, developed at Google, open-sourced in 2007 & ever growing since..

The talk would be ideal to anyone from a Software Architect, System Administrator, Cloud Computing enthusiast to University students, IT-staff, and my fellow Pythonistas.
And what do you know- The Python Software Foundation cluster is itself powered by “Ganeti” running at the Open Source Lab, in Oregon, USA.

Description

Many schools, institutes and SME’s possess untapped Hardware Infrastructure.
As an example scenario, I take my own institute. We have been granted over 20 high compute capacity nodes. Academic researchers, professors and students would like to have their own machine over the Institute network to host research projects, academic resources, collaborate, compute. Professors & researchers want the ability to run isolated set of machines for their research work.

But the ratio is a little problem!
Individuals : Servers :: 5000 : 20

How do we flexibly divide the compute power of the limited number of servers so that it benefits so many individuals? How do businesses tap the potential of their own commodity hardware to create a more productive environment for their employees?
Cloud Computing & Virtualization is the answer. We do have really awesome “Open Source Tools” that could help us setup our very own cloud.
Ganeti is one such Open Source tool that would be the focus of my talk.

Why Ganeti over the rest- when we have Openstack, Cloudstack and Eucalyptus?

Ganeti allows to setup your cloud on commodity hardware, with the least efforts and resources in comparison to the other tools out there. It is best suited for small companies and academic institutions with less demand for computing resources and a small IT staff.

Ganeti - At the OSU’s Open Source Lab

“Ganeti has proven to be the perfect production and development environment to quickly and easily spin up virtual machines for the open source projects housed at OSU’s Open Source Lab, including Python Software Foundation, Busybox, Inkscape, OpenMRS, phpBB, OSGeo,and Yum” -(Lance Albertson, Director, OSUOSL)

Here’s is a time-split up and the tentative sub-topics, I plan to speak on (35 min):

  1. Intro (5 min)

    • Who am I?
    • Private IaaS in Academic Institutions and SME’s, Open Source Tools.
    • Virtualization, Hypervisors, and the Cloud
  2. Looking into Ganeti. (7 min)

    • What is Ganeti? Do I need Ganeti?
    • Learning from peers - Ganeti at OSUOSL, Google.
    • Quick comparison of Ganeti to Openstack, Cloudstack and Eucalyptus.
  3. Diving into Ganeti & Setting up your own cluster. (12 min)

    • Cloud (Ganeti) Terminology - Cluster, Nodes and Virtual Machines.
    • Ganeti Components & Architecture.
    • A brief introduction to Ganeti-Command Line Interface.
    • Redundancy and Reliability via failovers, migration
  4. Ganeti Web Manager (4 min)

    • Brief Introduction to the Ganeti Web Manager Project, a web application interface to Ganeti for System administrators.
  5. Evaluating Ganeti Virtually (Optional) (7 min)

    • Setting up a virtual cluster using Vagrant-Ganeti
    • Small Live demo on a virtual cluster with 3 -nodes

Requirements

Basic knowledge about these would be helpful-

  • Linux System Administration
  • Operating Systems
  • Cloud computing
  • Knowledge of Python? Nah. We are not going to code over ganeti right away.
  • Laptops not required

Speaker bio

A final-year student at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, FOSS programmer, cloud computing enthusiast, web programmer, researcher. I am working with the OSU’s Open Source Lab via the Google Summer of Code 2013 program, on the Ganeti Web Manger project.

For updates on my work, follow me on github @pramttl

Any kind of constructive suggestions are solicited, at: pranjal.mittal.ece10@iitbhu.ac.in

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