[one-users] OpenNebula Vs Eculayptus

[Ruben S. Montero]

Hi

Yes you are right, both tools can be used to build a cloud. IMHO the
main differences
are:

* OpenNebula gives you a superior administration interface. You can
migrate, suspend VMs and so on. Also OpenNebula gives you a flexible
physical host interface to monitor, and manage the physical resources
of the cloud. This admin. interface and functionality is missing from
the current Eucalyptus releases, only the functionality offered by EC2
can be used (i.e. no suspend or migration of any kind)

* OpenNebula gives you better placement policies. Either its
out-of-the-box matchmaking algorithm that can be tuned with
user-driver consolidation hints or in combination with Haizea that
allows gives you advance reservation capabilities. There are some
research initiatives developing GreenIT friendly schedulers for
OpenNebula. Eucalyptus uses a round-robin approach.

* OpenNebula allows you to manage complete services. With OpenNebula
you can manage a service (set of VMs) as a whole including private
networks to interconnect the service VMs. As Eucalyptus is tied to the
EC2 interface you can not defined virtual networks.

* Support for advance contextualization. OpenNebula gives you the
ability to push any context data to a VM,  so it can auto-configure at
boot time. (for example software licenses, IP of the service master,
data from other VM, the role of the VM... ). I think this kind
contextualization can not be done with Eucalyptus.

* OpenNebula gives you a powerful API to extend its capabilities.
Either to build applications on top of it or to integrate any
storage/virtualization/network technologies. Check  the ecosystem[1]
and related software[2] pages. Eucalyptus only gives you the EC2-soap
interface to interact with it.

* Support for multiple Virtualization technologies, KVM, Xen. Next
release will include VMware, the driver is already implemented so you
can try it to day[3]. Eucalyptus supports Xen, and KVM which seems to
be their preferred platform [4]

* OpenNebula can be integrated with any storage solution. As an
example you can check the VIDA drivers [5] that  add support for
multiple transport protocols (e.g., bittorrent). Probably this level
of integration can be done with Eucalyptus but I am not aware of any
works in that direction.

* OpenNebula can be used to build hybrid clouds, (EC2  and Elastic
Hosts based). So you can either deploy your VMs locally or in other
cloud. This can not be done with Eucalyptus.

* OpenNebula gives you a libvirt interface so you can control your
infrastructure with the libvirt API or using its related tools (e.g.
virsh).

* Eucalyptus gives you the EC2 SOAP-API implementation. OpenNebula 1.2
does not provides a simplified cloud interface like this to share your
resources. However OpenNebula 1.4 includes a cloud API to implement
any cloud interface, as an example we include the implementation of a
subset of the EC2-Query API. This is also ready in the development
branches

* Eucalyptus gives you an S3 implementations. There is no such
functionality in OPenNebula 1.2, however OpenNebula 1.4 will include a
simple Image management tool.

Probably people on the list can complete or correct this.

Cheers!

Ruben

REFs:
[1] http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=ecosystem
[2] http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=relatedsoftware
[3] http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=documentation:rel1.4:vmwareg
[4] http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/hosted/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218400258&subSection=Infrastructure
[5] http://dc.crs4.it/tools/vct/download


On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Massimo Canonico <canonico at mfn.unipmn.it> wrote:
> Hi guys!
> I'm newbie.
>
> I'm playing with Eucalyptus (open.eucalyptus.com) and now I
> have took a quick look at OpenNebula web pages and it seems similar to
> Eucalyptus.
> I was wondering which are the main difference between the two approaches.
>
> Is there someone with experience on both approaches?
>
> Thanks,
> M
> _______________________________________________
> 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
+---------------------------------------------------------------+