Announcing Eucalyptus
Thursday March 19th, 2009
I'm very pleased to announce the availability of Eucalyptus in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope!
From the package description:
EUCALYPTUS is an open source service overlay that implements elastic computing using existing resources. The goal of EUCALYPTUS is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to co-host an elastic computing service that is interface-compatible with Amazon's EC2.Simply put: Eucalyptus gives you your very own EC2 in your own data center.
Being interface-compatible with EC2 means that anything you might already be doing with EC2 you can now do with your local Eucalyptus instance.
There are three notable packages:
- eucalyptus-cloud
- The cloud controller. You will generally only have one of these. It provides Walrus (Eucalyptus' S3 implementation) and is the part of Eucalyptus that users will talk to using the EC2 API.
- eucalyptus-cc
- The cluster controller. If you're familiar with EC2, you can think of this as the master server for an availabilty zone. Most people will only have one of these.
- eucalyptus-nc
- The node controller. This is the component that instantiates your virtual machines (instances, in EC2 speak). You will install this on each of your servers that will be running virtual machines for Eucalyptus.
The quick start guide:
- Install all three packages on a machine with lots of available ressources, both in terms of CPU, RAM, and disk space.
sudo apt-get install eucalyptus-cloud eucalyptus-cc eucalyptus-nc - After a while (perhaps up to a minute or two, even on beefy servers), you should be able to access the admin interface on https://ip_or_hostname_of_your_server:8443/. (You must use https, not http).
- Set up the admin user (should be self-explanatory)
- Add the cluster controller in the configuration tab
- From the command line, add the node to the cluster: "
sudo euca_conf -addnode name_of_this_server" and follow the instructions it gives you. - At this point you should be ready to upload kernels, ramdisks, and filesystem images to your cloud. You can find a bit of information about how here: http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/wiki/EucalyptusImageManagement_v1.4. It is not completely up-to-date with the version we have in Ubuntu, but it's very helpful nonetheless.
A few notable differences between our packages and what you'll see mentioned on the Eucalyptus website are that our version uses KVM as the default hypervisor and it also supports EBS. I expect the upstream documentation will be updated soon to reflect these cool new features.
A big "Thank you!" goes out to everyone who played a big part in this:
- All the guys in the Eucalyptus group at UCSB: Chris, Dan, Neil, Graziano, Dmitrii, and Rich for creating Eucalyptus and making it awesome!
- Thierry from our very own server team, for sorting out all the Java dependencies along Chris from UCSB.
- Chris Jones for lots of very helpful feedback from alpha testing this whole thing.
Enjoy!
