Integrating hybrid cloud with Virtual Computing Laboratory

Miha Grohar (2011) Integrating hybrid cloud with Virtual Computing Laboratory. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) environment at Computer communications lab enables students remote access to virtual environments, in which they fulfill their course assignments. It is comprised of 11 physical servers with VMware hardware virtualization that allows provisioning of virtual machines. Most of the time the private cloud in underutilizated, while it gets overutilizated during usage peaks at the end of semester or around deadlines for certain student assignments. In this thesis we suggest a solution for the overutilization problem in form of a hybrid cloud. Current private cloud could still be used as it was untill now, but we would have a possibility to expand available resources with public cloud during usage peaks. To address this issue we have developed a new VCL provisioning module for provisioning Amazon EC2 public cloud resources. Hybrid cloud solution expands capabilites of VCL environment during usage peaks and provides optimal resource utilization. With public cloud's »pay-as-you-go« model we only pay for resources (compute cycles, storage) that we actually use. With hybrid cloud we achieve better cost efficency, than we would have with investments into new physical infrastructure to meet the demand for resources during usage peaks. To really understand how hybrid cloud solution works, we discuss cloud computing, describe open-source VCL environment and EC2 public cloud. In the end we explain how to integrate hybrid cloud with connecting via public cloud's API interface and suggest hybrid cloud's architecture in case of Computer communications lab. The result of this thesis is a working proof-of-concept hybrid cloud solution for VCL environment.

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