We are building a Cloud Computing Living Lab. Principal motivations and objectives are
- to innovate with the Swiss SME sector
- to foster Cloud Computing uptake
- to conduct academic research in all aspects of the Cloud Computing technology stack
- include Cloud Computing topics into service engineering curriculum
The framework of choice is OpenStack, which apparently enjoys significant industry and academic support and has reached good levels of maturity. The lab will support pre-productive usage scenarios on top of OpenStack services as well as experimental research on OpenStack technology and potential extensions. A simplified and logical representation of the lab is shown in the figure.
The lab is equipped with 15 computing units, each running on 8×2.4 Ghz Cores, 64GB RAM and 4x1TB local storage per unit. To store templates and other data there is a 12TB NFS or iSCSI Storage which is connected to the switch with a 10Gbit Ethernet interface. The Computing Units are connected to a 1Gbit network for data and another 1Gbit net for control traffic.
The heart of the CCLab is the Management Server which provides an easy way to stage different setups for
different OpenStack instances (productive, experimental, etc). The Management Server provides a DHCP, PXE and NFS Server and some pre-configured processes which allow a computing unit to copy a master image into its RAM an run it from there. This provides a great deal of flexibility and support for different usage scenarios.
„Okay, that is pretty cool. When can make use of it?“
Not yet; we are working on it; the hardware arrived. Stay tuned.