A Comparison and Critique of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and Nimbus

Eucalyptus, Open Nebula and Nimbus are three major open-source cloud-computing software platforms. The overall function of these systems is to manage the provisioning of virtual machines for a cloud providing infrastructure-as-a-service. These various open-source projects provide an important alternative for those who do not wish to use a commercially provided cloud. We provide a comparison and analysis of each of these systems. We begin with a short summary comparing the current raw feature set of these projects. After that, we deepen our analysis by describing how these cloud management frameworks relate to the many other software components required to create a functioning cloud computing system. We also analyse the overall structure of each of these projects and address how the differing features and implementations reflect the different goals of each of these projects. Lastly, we discuss some of the common challenges that emerge in setting up any of these frameworks and suggest avenues of further research and development. These include the problem of fair scheduling in absence of money, eviction or preemption, the difficulties of network configuration, and the frequent lack of clean abstractions.

[1]  Edward Walker,et al.  Personal adaptive clusters as containers for scientific jobs , 2007, Cluster Computing.

[2]  Shishir Garg,et al.  Opening the clouds: qualitative overview of the state-of-the-art open source VM-based cloud management platforms , 2009, Middleware.

[3]  Wolfgang Gentzsch,et al.  Sun Grid Engine: towards creating a compute power grid , 2001, Proceedings First IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid.

[4]  Borja Sotomayor,et al.  Virtual Infrastructure Management in Private and Hybrid Clouds , 2009, IEEE Internet Computing.

[5]  Cameron Kiddle,et al.  An Assessment of Eucalyptus Version 1.4 , 2009 .

[6]  Glauco Estácio Gonçalves,et al.  A Survey on Open-source Cloud Computing Solutions , 2010 .

[7]  Bruno Schulze,et al.  Performance and deployment evaluation of a parallel application in an on-premises Cloud environment , 2009, MGC '09.

[8]  Rafael Moreno-Vozmediano,et al.  Elastic management of cluster-based services in the cloud , 2009, ACDC '09.

[9]  G. Bruce Berriman,et al.  On the Use of Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows , 2008, 2008 IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience.

[10]  Borja Sotomayor,et al.  Combining batch execution and leasing using virtual machines , 2008, HPDC '08.

[11]  P. Mato,et al.  CernVM - a virtual appliance for LHC applications , 2009 .

[12]  Ian Lumb,et al.  A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Computing Systems , 2009, 2009 Fifth International Joint Conference on INC, IMS and IDC.

[13]  David Hilley,et al.  Cloud Computing: A Taxonomy of Platform and Infrastructure-level Offerings , 2009 .

[14]  Richard Wolski,et al.  The Eucalyptus Open-Source Cloud-Computing System , 2009, 2009 9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid.

[15]  Bofeng Zhang,et al.  Comparison of Several Cloud Computing Platforms , 2009, 2009 Second International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering.

[16]  Borja Sotomayor,et al.  Capacity Leasing in Cloud Systems using the OpenNebula Engine , 2008 .

[17]  Katarzyna Keahey,et al.  Contextualization: Providing One-Click Virtual Clusters , 2008, 2008 IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience.

[18]  Paul Marshall,et al.  Elastic Site: Using Clouds to Elastically Extend Site Resources , 2010, 2010 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing.

[19]  Muli Ben-Yehuda,et al.  The Reservoir model and architecture for open federated cloud computing , 2009, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[20]  M. Kunze,et al.  The Cumulus project: Build a scientific cloud for a data center , 2009 .

[21]  Renato Figueiredo,et al.  Science Clouds: Early Experiences in Cloud Computing for Scientific Applications , 2008 .

[22]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Article in Press Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) – Future Generation Computer Systems Cloud Computing and Emerging It Platforms: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering Computing as the 5th Utility , 2022 .

[23]  Miron Livny,et al.  Condor and the Grid , 2003 .

[24]  Xi He,et al.  Cloud Computing: a Perspective Study , 2010, New Generation Computing.