StratusLab Reference Cloud Service

StratusLab has deployed a reference infrastructure and offers access to external third parties in order to test and evaluate the cloud solutions developed by the project. This infrastructure builds upon the latest stable release 1.2 of the StratusLab distribution and provides two types of cloud services:

• A cloud computing site for instantiating and managing Virtual Machines, as well as for creating persistent storage volumes to preserve and share your data and applications among multiple VM instances.
• A Marketplace providing access to pre-configured Virtual Machine and Disk images

The physical cloud-computing infrastructure is located in Athens, Greece, and is operated by GRNET (http://www.grnet.gr), the main resource provider of the StratusLab project. The project Marketplace instance is hosted by Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland (http://www.tcd.ie), which is responsible for the curation and provision of VM images and appliances.

In order to gain access to the reference cloud service and be able to instantiate your own Virtual Machines you should send an email to support@stratuslab.eu providing your full name, contact details, your institute and the project in which you are involved (if applicable).

For user authentication two different mecahnisms are supported:

• Username/password pair generated internally from StratusLab operations
• Digital certificate issued by an IGTF accredited Certification Authority. In this case authentication can be done directly using this certificate or by generating a VOMS proxy certificate signed from the above.

During your enrollment you may chose either authentication method. For the certificate based ones you will have to send us in your request the Distinguished Name as it appears in your certificate.

Once your request is approved you will be sent an email with the details for accessing the cloud service.

You will need to download the StratusLab client tools that allow you to access remotely the cloud and to control the lifecycle of your Virtual Machine instances. They also allow you to create entries for the Marketplace, generate your own VM appliances based on pre-existing images which then can be reference from the Marketplace and instantiated in the cloud.

The tools are available from our Get Started page.

The endpoint for invoking the cloud services is:

cloud.grnet.stratuslab.eu

The above hostname should be passed as a parameter to StratusLab command line tools or be set in the STRATUS_ENDPOINT environment variable.

At the heart of the StratusLab distribution lies OpenNebula v2.2 (http://www.opennebula.org) cloud management toolkit. OpenNebula is an open-source software developed by UCM (Universidad Complutense de Madrid - http://www.ucm.es/), one of the project’s key partners. The client-side tools communicate with the OpenNebula endpoint through the native XML-RPC protocol provided by the service. Additional cloud management APIs (OCCI and EC2) currently supported by OpenNebula are expected to be integrated soon in the StratusLab distribution.

For what concerns the hypervisor, the most popular technologies like Xen, KVM and VMware can potentially be used. In our specific setup for the reference cloud service we use KVM.

Currently StratusLab v1.2 and the respective reference cloud service give the ability to instantiate and manage the lifecycle of virtual machines. For the time being, no network management services are supported.

The Markeplace is publicly accessible from:

http://marketplace.stratuslab.eu

The Marketplace currently offers base OS images for various Linux distributions including:

• ttylinux 9.7
• CentOS 5.5
• Fedora 14
• Ubuntu 10.04 Server

With time, more base images as well as virtual appliances will become available. External users also have the ability to upload their own base images and appliances to the repository. For instructions on how to prepare your own appliance and upload it on the StratusLab Marketplace consult the User Tutorial.

At the time a user may instantiate VMs with the following hardware profiles:

Type        CPUs     RAM         SWAP      
m1.xlarge   2        1024 MB     1024 MB   
m1.small    1         128 MB     1024 MB   
c1.medium   1         256 MB     1024 MB   
c1.xlarge   4        2048 MB     2048 MB   
m1.large    2         512 MB     1024 MB   

The cloud service is running on 16 dual quad core Intel Xeon E5520 nodes, with HyperThreading enabled. One additional node is used as the service frontend. In total, we provide 256 logical cores that can be used from by VM instances. Each node is configured with 48 GByte main memory. The base OS we use is Linux Fedora 14.

Storage is provided by a centralized storage server which currently serves a total of 3 TByte of storage shared among all the nodes with NFSv3.

No firewall restrictions are applied externally to the VMs. All ports are open for end-user applications. Users are responsible to configure their own port restrictions inside the VM images and for the overall security of the image in general.

Currently the StratusLab cloud services are provided as is with no guarantees about the availability and stability of the service. We are making the best effort to provide a stable cloud infrastructure but at the moment we cannot guarantee that a VM instance might not crash or temporarily be unavailable due to a software or network problem. As the distribution matures the infrastructure is expected to become more stable and reliable. Our final goal is to offer a high-quality production cloud service.

You can use StratusLab distribution v1.0 to deploy your own cloud services. The software is open source and available from the project repositories. Currently we support Fedora14 operating system and two modes of installation:

1. Manual Installation, or
2. Using the Quattor Toolkit.

You should direct any enquiries related to the above services to support@stratuslab.eu. Please use the same contact for reporting problems or requesting any special arrangements for the cloud service setup. Notice that as with the infrastructure itself the support services are currently provided on best effort basis.