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Advance Reservation of Capacity in Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures

New Release of the Haizea Lease Manager
By Ignacio M. Llorente
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February 23, 2009 09:15 AM EST
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 1,952

Haizea is an open source lease management architecture that OpenNebula can use as a scheduling backend. Haizea can also be run in simulation, providing a platform for experimenting with scheduling algorithms that depend on VM (Virtual Machine) deployment or on the leasing abstraction. Haizea uses leases as a fundamental resource provisioning abstraction, and implements those leases as virtual machines, taking into account the overhead of using virtual machines (e.g., deploying a disk image for a VM) when scheduling leases. Using OpenNebula with Haizea allows resource providers to lease their resources, using potentially complex lease terms, instead of only allowing users to request VMs that must start immediately.

One of the types of lease implemented by Haizea is advance reservation of capacity. Other VM management solutions and cloud providers like Amazon EC2, Flexiscale or ElasticHost use immediate, where VMs mu st be allocated right away or not at all, or best-effort, where VMs state pending until resource allocation, provisioning models. Service provisioning clouds have requirements that cannot be supported only with an immediate provisioning model, such as resource requests that are subject to non-trivial policies and capacity reservations at specific times to meet peak capacity requirements. They want to rely on advance reservation in order to ensure the service workload can be executed at the provider’s site. Additionally, smaller clouds with limited resources, where not all requests may be satisfiable immediately for lack of resources could benefit from more complex VM placement strategies supporting queues, priorities, and advance reservations. Advance reservation is also required for co-allocation of service components within or across cloud providers.

I recommend the post on Haizea and Private Clouds written by Borja Sotomayor, author of Haizea, to know more details about this useful technology and its position in the Cloud ecosystem.

The latest version of the Haizea Lease Manager (Technology Preview 1.3) was released a few days ago. Technology Preview 1.3 now includes support for OpenNebula 1.2, and enhanced stability and robustness. This is a new step towards TP2.0, which will include a policy engine and several novel scheduling features.

Published February 23, 2009 – Reads 1,952
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More Stories By Ignacio M. Llorente

Ignacio M. Llorente, Ph.D in Computer Science and Executive MBA, is a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology, and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid. He has held several appointments as an independent expert for the European Commission (Information Society and Media Directorate-General); visiting positions at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA); consultancy positions with Sun Microsystems; and a Senior Researcher position in the Advanced Computing Lab at CAB (associated to NASA Astrobiology Institute). He has 17 years of experience in research and development of advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms, and management of international projects and initiatives on Grid and Cloud computing; having led the research group in 15 sponsored projects; and having published more than 130 scientific papers in the leading journals and proceedings books. He is currently co-leading the research and development of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, the Globus GridWay Metascheduler, and the Grid4Utility initiative for federation of Grids. He participates in the EGEE and BEinGRID European projects, as UCM partner responsible, and in the Globus Alliance, as chair of one of its projects; and coordinates the Activity on Management of Virtual Execution Environments in the RESERVOIR Project, main EU-funded research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. He is the Grid Community Liaison Coordinator for the Service Oriented Infrastructure Working Group of NESSI; and co-chairs the OGF Working Group on Open Cloud Computing Interface. He coordinates the Middleware Activity in the Spanish Initiative in e-Science and the Working Group on Service Oriented Infrastructures and Grids of INES.