[one-users] Self-service Cloud View use case

[Riccardo Brunetti]

Thanks Steve and Olivier for your prompt reply.
I will try to follow your suggestions, but I'm still missing a point:
let's consider this use case (quite common I suppose in a cloud
provisioning service).
I have a user who wants 2 VMs, based on a given base image and template,
and wants them persistent because he needs them to keep the
modifications after a shutdown.
The problem is that I can't have 2 instances of the same image if that
image is marked persistent. On the other hand, if the image is not
persistent, the user should instantiate the VMs, save them, mark the new
ones persistent and re-deploy them. This is something that a, let's say,
"non enough skilled" user can't do easily.
What it seems to me is missing (or at least I can't find) is something
like an atomic "clone-in-persistent-and-deploy" mechanism.
 
Best Regards.
Riccardo

On 08/06/2013 03:27 PM, Steven Timm wrote:
> FermiCloud does something quite similar to what you are asking
> for below, although we are currently using an earlier version
> of OpenNebula.
>
> The persistence of images and the persistence of IP addresses
> are controlled independently in OpenNebula.  Typically for
> our fixed-ipVM's we do have a separate image for every
> user and each one of those images is marked "persistent" in the VM
> store. but we also have a standard image that anyone can use, with fixed
> IP or with dynamic IP.. if the user then wants to make modifications
> to their image and store their image, they can do that.
>
> If you need more details, you can email me privately.
>
> Steve Timm
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Riccardo Brunetti wrote:
>
>> Dear OpenNebula users.
>> We are setting up a IaaS service using opennebula 4.2, which should be
>> used by our users to perform a self-provisioning of virtual machine.
>> Basically, each user should choose one of the available VM templates and
>> one of the available VM images and self-deploy a given number of VM for
>> his personal use.
>> It seems that this is really the use case of the Self-service Cloud
>> described in:
>>
>> http://opennebula.org/documentation:rel4.2:cloud_view
>>
>> but there is something that we are still missing.
>> The point is that each user should be able to "buy" an instance, use it,
>> modify it, switch it off and on and do whatever he wants preserving the
>> changes.
>> Moreover, each time the machine is instantiated it must get the same IP
>> address. In other words, each instance should be persistent.
>> From the above doc, it is not clear to us if this is actually the case.
>> If the images are not defined persistent, the changes are lost and, on
>> the other hand, we can't define them persistent since we want many users
>> be able to use them.
>> Moreover, it seems that it's possible to pin a given IP address only at
>> the level of the template but, once again, the same template is supposed
>> to be used by many customer.
>>
>> The only possibility that we can see is to clone the same image for each
>> user, making each clone persistent, and provide the same number of
>> templates, but this is something that easily becomes unfeasible as soon
>> as the number of users increases.
>>
>> Anybody has ever tried to make such a service? Can you please give us
>> some suggestions or show us what we are missing?
>>
>> Best Regards.
>> R. Brunetti
>> _______________________________________________
>> Users mailing list
>> Users at lists.opennebula.org
>> http://lists.opennebula.org/listinfo.cgi/users-opennebula.org
>>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Steven C. Timm, Ph.D  (630) 840-8525
> timm at fnal.gov  http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/
> Fermilab Scientific Computing Division, Scientific Computing Services
> Quad.
> Grid and Cloud Services Dept., Group leader of Grid and Cloud Services
> Operations.  Lead of FermiCloud Project.