Eucalyptus Private Cloud: an introduction

Eucalyptus provides software platform for on-premise (private) clouds which can be used as a Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), It’s an open source cloud product supporting private and hybrid cloud environments using existing available infrastructure providing capability to provide scalable, secure web services layer which utilizes compute, network and storage.

It supports Amazon Web Services API’s and uses infrastructure virtualization software to cater to elastic service pools. Main benefits being efficient scalability and increased resource utilization and greater control over on-premise IT.Eucalyptus being compatible with Amazon APIs helping users to manage amazon or Eucalyptus images through eucalyptus commands, It also makes it easier to move instances between amazon public clod and eucalyptus private cloud enabling you to create hybrid cloud. Capability of achieving operating system virtualization helping us to provide isolation among applications and various stacks.

Basic Architecture:

Above figure illustrates the basic architecture of any Eucalyptus private cloud set up consisting of components like Cluster Controller, Storage controller, Node Controller, Cloud Controller and Walrus etc.

Cloud Controller (CLC): It plays as an entry point for all; be it be administrators or users It keeps the information about resources and makes requests to cluster controller. Being a management platform interface it can be accessed through command lines tools or through dashboard.

Cluster Controller (CC): It helps in collecting information about the Node Controllers (NC) and scheduling the execution of virtual machines on specific NCs.It has to be in a same subnet as CC if it’s a single CC environment, Generally its executes on machines having network connectivity to NC and CLC.

Node Controller (NC): It can be executed on a machine hosting VM instances; it controls all VM activities like execution, termination of VM instances. The Node Controller (NC) executes on any machine that hosts VM instances. It also fetches and maintains a local cache of instance images, and it queries and controls the system software (host OS and the hypervisor) in response to queries and control requests from the CC. The NC is also responsible for the management of the virtual network endpoint.

Walrus: Walrus works as a repository to store data can be organised as buckets and objects, you can use Walrus to create, delete, and list buckets, or to put, get, and delete objects, or to set access control policies. It can access vvirtual machine images and user data. Walrus can be accessed by end user.

Storage Controller (SC): It has the ability to provide interface to various storage systems (NFS, iSCSI, SAN devices, etc.). Users can create snapshots from EBS volumes. Snapshots are stored in Walrus and made available across availability zones

Features:

•  Eucalyptus is one of the popular private cloud platforms built through open source; it supports self service automation, User and group management for providing security features.
•   Eucalyptus can be configured in a High Availability (HA) mode which maximizes the reliability supporting hot failover and repair mechanisms
•  Supports most of the operating system formats hence managing the images of multiple versions becomes flexible
•  It can be integrated with SANs so that storage elasticity is achieved
•  It can also be integrated for chargeback and quota management applications
•  Resource administration through Eucalyptus dashboard
•  VMware Hypervisor support and Amazon web services API compatibility

        The idea is to have an exposure to private cloud technology platform and embracing it to optimize usage of the available resources; having built and tested this type of set up at labs gives you that clear understanding on Eucalyptus.