2014 #vBrownBag OpenStack Summit Atlanta Dinkar Sitaram — OpenSim the OpenStack Simulator
While OpenStack is extremely popular, there are very few tools to predict performance in an enterprise deployment. In research, a challenge faced in evaluating new strategies like scheduling algorithms and load balancing policies for an OpenStack cloud is that, it is impracticable to experiment with new strategies on the cloud. Therefore a simulator that can accurately model an OpenStack environment, validate architectural concepts and evaluate the efficiency of algorithms would be a computationally efficient and scalable approach.
Our effort in this direction has led to OpenSim, a simulator of OpenStack services. Currently the following OpenStack services have been implemented and validated namely Nova, Quantum, Cinder and Swift. OpenSim simulates the scheduling algorithm of Nova, VM connectivity in Quantum, Swift’s object storage and Cinder’s persistent storage.
OpenSim built on top of CloudSim, enables application developers/designers to determine the best strategy for allocation of provisioned resources among the available datacenters, policies for selecting a server to launch a virtual machine to serve a specific request and the cost associated with the operation. Moreover it also facilitates evaluation of a hypothesis in a repeatable, controlled and timely manner prior to software development in a cloud environment. The simulation is validated by using the workload obtained from benchmarking OpenStack using tools like UnixBench, sar, iostat.
Our talk would delve into the detailed implementation of each OpenStack service, the services under implementation and the ones to be implemented in the future. It will be accompanied by demos and validation test cases for each service.
by vBrownBag
openstack
