[one-users] "Hybrid Cloud" - OpenNebula/Eucalyptus/etc.

[Ignacio Martin Llorente]

Dear Philipp,

> I'm having a hard time in understanding some parts of cloud computing,
> esp. what the exact definition of a "Hybrid Cloud" is. If you guys could
> help me with the following questions, that would be great. Thanks.
> 
> * Both OpenNebula and Eucalyptus have so called cloud controllers. Why
>  is there a dedicated machine to handle the cloud? Can it be on the
>  same host as a node?

Well, in principle, you could use one of the nodes to execute the OpenNebula instance, but for performance, configuration and scalability issues you should use a different node. Please check http://www.opennebula.org/documentation:rel1.4:plan about how to plan an installation.

> 
>    * OpenNebula supports 'hybrid clouds'. What exactly is the
>      definition of a hybrid cloud?
> 
>          o Is it only a common interface for completely different
>            clouds?
> 
>          o Or is it possible in a hybrid cloud to move images between
>            different clouds? For example, move a KVM/QEMU image to
>            Amazon EC2 with OpenNebula?
> 
>          o If it is the former one (just a common interface), how is
>            it possible to "scale out" if the images are incompatible?
> 
>     
OpenNebula implements hybrid cloud computing at infrastructure level. This means that the users submit machines to a primary cloud site, and the site manager according to business policies could decide to forward the VMs to a remote cloud provider (see http://www.opennebula.org/documentation:rel1.4:introh). We do not solve portability issues with the images, the user should create the images for the internal VMs and for the remote cloud provider (for example AMIs for EC2).

As far as we know, OpenNebula is the only technology providing this hybrid cloud computing support, providing plugins to access Amazon EC2, ElasticHosts or other OpenNebula instances. This supports not only cloudbursting scenarios to multiple clouds but also cloud federation. 

Other cloud management products claim that provide hybrid cloud computing because they offer an interface similar to that provided by a commercial cloud offering, and so the user can submit VMs locally or remotely. We do not think users should take care of this, scale-out decisions are usually taken by  infrastructure manager.

See this example http://blog.dsa-research.org/?p=98

> * Eucalyptus says it is EC2 compatible, but it seems to me it it
>      only API-compatible, not image-compatible.
>          o Can one move a Amazon image AMI to a eucalyptus cloud?


I feel this is not the best mailing list to ask question about Eucalyptus.

Regards

> 
> I hope some of the questions are not too off-topic, but I had no idea
> who else to ask...
> 
> Regards,
> Philipp
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