1. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Experiences with a Private Cloud
St Andrews Cloud Computing co-laboratory
James W. Smith
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
{jws7, akh}@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk

2. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Background
• School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews launched StACC
in April 2009
– Funding of £0.5million for:
• PhD Studentships
• Experimental hardware platform
• Technical Support
• Aim is to explore the research potential of Cloud Computing
– Bringing together researchers from:
• Distributed Systems
• High-performance Computing
• Systems Engineering
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3. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Motivation
• Motivations for having a private cloud:
– Monitoring
• Energy consumption, network bandwidth, on board...
– We can break it
• And we do, frequently!
– Experiment with cloud software
• Hypervisors
• Provisioning
– Modifications
• Speed scaling algorithms
• We anticipate that the lessons learned from a private cloud can be applied to a
massive cloud
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4. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
How to build a Cloud
• Server infrastructure
– 10 machines
– 2x 4 core CPU, 16GB RAM, 2TB Storage
• Networking
– Switch,fibre optic, 1Gbit Cat6
• Cloud Software
– Eucalyptus, VMware, etc
– We had one of the first working Eucalyptus private clouds in UK
academia
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5. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Our setup
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6. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Eucalyptus
• Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful
Systems
• EC2 like functionality
– Spawn VMs on demand
– Interact in a similar way to EC2
• Positive Experiences
– Our system is now stable and is being used by both academia and industry partners
– Fantastic ability to provision resources on demand
– Our own platform for monitoring
– Exposure to building these types of systems
– Works like Amazon, but can combat some concerns
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7. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Eucalyptus Issues
• No VM management GUI
– Problem for non-technical users
• Monitoring is not clear
– Investigating use of Nagios & other techniques
• Common errors not well documented
– Online wiki at http://open.eucalyptus.com needs community input
• Needs a part-time sysadmin
– just to deal with Computing Officers & ITS
• Can’t limit how many resources people can use
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8. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Problems Encountered
• General networking / linux problems
– Quite a complex piece of software & interactions
– Requires a good deal of linux and networking knowledge
• DHCP, VLANS, Subnets, IPTables
• Eucalyptus specific
– configuration
• manages network which can lead to problems with existing network
– software upgrade
• 1.5 had problems, re-install required to goto 1.6
– ssh into instances
– problem with volumes
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9. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
So if we haven’t put you off...
• If you want to build your own Private Cloud with
Eucalyptus there are a few things to remember:
It is not as easy as it seems
It will take you longer than you anticipate
It does require regular administration
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10. Future
• Investigation with other Cloud Software
• Recent EPSRC grant -> expand our hardware
• Significantly increasing our monitoring capability
– performance degradation relating to Virtual Machines
– Network performance
– Energy Consumption
• Cloud Adoption Toolkit
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11. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Cloud Adoption Toolkit
• Wide range of research interests in StACC, our group is currently
developing the Cloud Adoption Toolkit
– based on our experiences with the private Cloud and other platforms
• A collection of tools that support decision-making during the adoption
of cloud computing in enterprise
• Support the process of migration
• Includes
– Modelling Cost & Energy
– Technology Analysis
– Stakeholder Impact & Requirements Analysis
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12. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Example of Cost Modelling
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13. University of St Andrews
School of Computer Science
Cost Report
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14. Contact
• If you would like to use the StACC Cloud please email:
– cloud_admin@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk
• Or if you wish to speak to me directly:
– jws7@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk
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