On premise Cloud Computing at UC Santa Cruz

Transcription

1 Project title: Submitter: Project team: On premise Cloud Computing Carol Jordan ITS Data Center Manager, UCSC , Cliff Pearson, ITS UNIX Systems Josh Sonstroem, ITS UNIX Systems Summary: It started, as these things often do, with one old server, lots of things we needed that server to do, and a UNIX engineer who wanted to try something new. That something new was Joyent SmartDataCenter [SDC]. With SDC, we turned one old server into enough virtual servers to meet each of those separate needs. With that success, we realized we could meet a need we d heard about for years: a low cost way for customers to access the benefits of the Data Center, while retaining their autonomy to provision and manage their own virtual servers. In other words...cloud Computing. We proposed a pilot project, to see what people would make of our cloud service, and to make sure that we had the right processes and hardware in place to support them. The pilot was a success, and we now offer a new service to the campus: On premise Cloud Computing. With our on premise cloud: Customers can provision and manage their own virtual servers. It s easy for people to try out new ideas quickly. If an idea takes off, it s easy to scale up...and if not, there s no hardware to decommission. Departments are replacing under the desk hardware with something that performs better, is more sustainable, and is easier to manage. We ve been successful because of our approach and the value that this service brings: Outreach: We did lots of demos, conducted hands on work sessions, wrote tutorials, and worked side by side with various departments across campus. Autonomy: We developed the parameters for the service in collaboration with UCSC s divisional IT liaisons. This group regularly reinforced the importance of providing autonomy to cloud computing customers. Access to Data Center Resources: As an additional benefit, our on premise cloud lets us provide broader access to the Data Center s resources like generator backed power, regular security scans, and engineers to manage the underlying operating system and hardware. We view this service as a lower cost and lower availability Page 1 of 5

2 complement to, rather than a replacement for, our existing VMware based virtual hosting service. Central Funding: Because this virtualization technology is extremely dense, it allows us to host hundreds of virtual servers per physical device. This density makes it possible to fund the service centrally. We wanted to put this technology right into the hands of the people who could make the most of it so that the folks across campus would be able to easily provision and manage systems for themselves and their departments or labs. Customer satisfaction Here s how we know the service is a hit! Some feedback from our customers: One of our best testimonials was from one local IT specialist who said, It would be great for central IT to provide more services like this just give us the tools and let us do things for ourselves. Without this service, I would still be king of the recycled servers and unable to fix little problems like the fact that we (ITS) don't have an SFTP service. It is also providing some professional development for my staff and students where I don't have to worry about sysadmin issues. Peter McMillan, Director, Client Relationship Management I just talked to a client about it yesterday, before the Joyent solution she would be one of those people who would set up a box in her office and run a LAMP stack on it, but with Joyent we can now just do it in the cloud in a VM and if the project idea does not get off the ground, as research ideas often don t, there s no cost and nothing to try and repurpose. Just delete the VM and go back to work. If the project takes off the infrastructure allows us to scale it up. Paul Sosbee, Academic Computing Expert for Social Sciences Computing The local IT specialist supporting research in Economics was able to save his clients some money by moving their website from an external hosting provider, back on campus and into the on premise cloud. One of the UNIX admins worked with a researcher to move a simulation experiment that currently runs on a half rack of very old servers in the Data Center, to a combination of XSEDE and SDC. Being able to retire these old, inefficient servers while proving the researcher with a better and more sustainable platform is a big win for everyone. The UCSC CCNIE project uses resources on SDC to power their configuration management, serve switch images, and host development infrastructure for data transfer. The Network Operation Center (NOC) uses an NFS volume mounted across the SDC storage network from a Smart Machine. The Data Center Operations (DCO) team utilizes SDC to run their internal DNS server and to deploy internal tools, software repositories, and for short term software development projects and proof of concepts. Page 2 of 5

3 Technology used in the project Since the original problem we were trying to solve was an internal one, we were very excited to find a solution based on the open source fork of Solaris. This let us leverage the deep engineering experience our staff already had, and let us use tools we were already familiar with, including ZFS, DTrace, and operating system virtualization through local zones. 1 Our cloud servers run Joyent SmartOS, and the virtual servers are called Smart Machines. 2 Here s a technical view of our cloud computing service : Initial implementation We began with SDC 6.4 installed on reclaimed hardware. In this proof of concept phase, we were really just looking for something to demonstrate to the campus community, and that would allow potential users to try out their applications and get a sense for how the service works. It also helped us gain insight into what features and architecture the community wanted, ultimately helping us develop the existing the complete support model. We had a simple install of a single head node running on a Dell R310 and a single compute node on a Dell R610. We had only 24GB of memory on the compute node, in which we were eventually able to run more than 15 Smart Machines. Current implementation 1 Joyent has the capability to present Windows or Linux operating systems as KVM style virtual servers. We ve found that the tools for managing KVMs are not as robust as those for SmartMachines. We ve also found that our clients have not had any requirements that couldn t be met with a Smart Machine. As a result, we haven t made KVMs part of the ongoing cloud computing service. 2 source: developers/01 resources/22 smartos datasheet/datasheet smartos.pdf Page 3 of 5

4 Once we secured funding for a formal pilot project, we used what we had learned during the proof of concept phase to implement a solution that could scale up to even more users. We also worked from user and divisional liaison feedback to develop and implement a three tiered Gold, Silver and Bronze support model. Using specifications developed by Joyent, we purchased three purpose built Supermicro servers, each with 128GB of memory and 16 CPU cores. One of the three machines (called the head node) is reserved for SDC internal VMs. Customer VMs live on one of the two compute nodes. This configuration currently supports more than 40 customer VMs, utilizing between 256MB and 16GB of RAM each. Our current resource utilization is about 20% of the compute nodes maximum. Based on the usage we ve seen during our pilot, we are able to forecast our capacity to be between 200 and 265 SmartMachines depending on deployment patterns, package selection, and disk utilization. In addition, as we start to adopt the SDC features for advanced memory management and resource allocation optimization, we think we will be able to support around 300 VMs with our current infrastructure. Continuation as a formal service As we move the service out of its pilot phase, we will upgrade to SDC 7. This will allow us to present solutions to all of the items the user community has asked for. These include: Centos Linux containers Ubuntu Linux containers Docker integration Sub users Hosting for confidential data NFS storage for backups Timeframe of implementation: June 2012: the seed is planted September 2012: the UNIX teams starts working with SmartOS for internal tools November 2013: formal support contract signed with Joyent May 2014: campus pilot approved, hardware ordered April 2015: approved to continue as a formal, production service July 2015: upgrade to SDC 7 Relevant URLs: UCSC s cloud computing service definition: center/dc services/joyent.html Joyent private cloud: cloud Why SmartOS? Page 4 of 5

5 smartos kvm dtrace zones and more Conclusion In summary, we think our on premise cloud computing project is a good candidate for a Sautter Award because we have met the criteria as follows: We re innovative Our on premise cloud computing service is a completely new way for IT folks to provision and manage their own servers. We took a small, internal service and found a way to make it available campus wide. People were asking for a less expensive way to host divisional computing resources and we delivered a solution that not only provides for this, but allows them to retain autonomy over their own virtual infrastructure. We re improving operational efficiency Our project lets people across campus provision and manage lightweight virtual servers in a way that is even easier (and more sustainable) than running a server under their desks. The user interface is simple and easy to use letting people learn about cloud computing without the complexity and expense of public cloud hosting. With this project, we can now extend the benefits of the data center environment more broadly than we ever could before. And because we can host lots of virtual servers on relatively inexpensive hardware, this service makes very efficient use of servers and of server administrator time. Our cloud computing solution is shareable We can federate our UCSC based cloud with other campuses; users can then specify the campus (availability zone) where they want their virtual servers to run. We can also work with others to replicate the work we ve done. We have started this outreach work through the system wide Joint Data Center Managers group. We re collaborative Since this is a new kind of service, we developed a new kind of partnership with the distributed IT campus community. We worked closely with UCSC academic divisions to shape the service for adoption across campus by a wide variety of departments. We also developed a robust support community whereby users of the service can document their solutions, share them with others, and support newer users as they build out their own applications and architectures. Finally, we spent a lot of time working with our Infrastructure Security and Networking teams to establish a strong, flexible, and secure infrastructure to support the service. We hope that this collaboration will extend to other UC campuses, filling similar gaps in central hosting solutions. This service only becomes more robust and flexible as usage expands. Page 5 of 5