[one-users] Suggestions for a small cluster

[Ruben S. Montero]

Hi,

It depends on the use you plan for the cloud. Right now, we are using
one private cloud for our students. They only use plain Linux
installations and virtual clusters, so we only need a couple of master
images for each configuration and then we clone them (see note [1]).
The students work then with their virtual environment.

If that is your situation (few images), probably you can use just the
front-end to store the image repository. In this case, you are going
to clone a lot of environments in the cluster nodes, so you should use
the non-shared (SSH) configuration. you may be interested in using a
shared image repository. Check the storage models in

http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=documentation:rel1.2:sm


Also you need to think about the network requirements. For example, we
have all our cloud blades connected to the Internet through a switch.
In this way we have a pool of public IPs so the students can log in
their virtual environments from anywhere. Also all the blades are
connected through other switch, so we can make private networks for
the virtual clusters. Check the picture in

http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=documentation:rel1.2:nm

Finally, we are currently using such configuration for some of our
courses. So far, it has been a very positive experience. Specially the
ability to give the students their own cluster to test things without
worries. We think it's worth the effort of setting up the cloud..

Please keep up us updated with your progress and don't hesitate to ask
for more info

Cheers

Ruben

Note [1], Usually we do not make the virtual environments persistent.
This means that sometimes the students reboots the VMs and lost their
work. So it is important to make that clear. If you need to keep the
changes on the VM you can save it with the onevm stop command.

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:03 PM, jaideep dhok <jddhok at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> We want to setup a private cloud for the students in our lab and we
> need some help regarding the same. We have never used OpenNebula
> before, so please excuse us if the questions are too naive.
> The physical structure of the cluster is:
> 20 Intel quad core machines, 4GB RAM, 500 GB * 2 disks each
> 10 Intel dual core machines, 2GB RAM, 160 GB * 2 disks each.
> We want to build an OpenNebula based private cloud on the above
> infrastructure. We don't have any dedicated storage servers. What is
> the recommended logical configuration for such a cluster? is it
> recommended that we have few machines for dedicated storage (for
> storing images etc)? Which Linux distro should we go with? currently
> we are considering CentOS, Ubuntu 8.04 server, and Debian Lenny.
>
> Any advice, suggestions are greatly appreciated
>
> Thanks,
> --
> - JDD
> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> Users at lists.opennebula.org
> http://lists.opennebula.org/listinfo.cgi/users-opennebula.org
>



-- 
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
 Dr. Ruben Santiago Montero
 Associate Professor
 Distributed System Architecture Group (http://dsa-research.org)

 URL:    http://dsa-research.org/doku.php?id=people:ruben
 Weblog: http://blog.dsa-research.org/?author=7

 GridWay, http://www.gridway.org
 OpenNebula, http://www.opennebula.org
+---------------------------------------------------------------+