wiki:vmiGec8DemoDescription

Version 1 (modified by Vic Thomas, 14 years ago) (diff)

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GENI VMI-FED: Description of Demo for GEC8

The intent of the demonstration at GEC 8 is to show VMI running on cluster nodes in a lab environment at the University of Alaska (UA). The demonstration will:

  • Demonstrate VMI-based data capture on live nodes, including PlanetLab (Linux VServer) and BEN-Orca (Xen) nodes running in a UA Lab, and a local server to ensure that the demonstration can continue in the case of interrupted network access at the demonstration site. This will demonstrate the ability of the 3 layer VIX architecture to monitor end-nodes on dramatically different virtualization platforms by simply swapping out the low level VIX Virtualization Access Layer (VIX-VAL), which continuing to use the same VIX Data Access Layer (VIX-DAL) and VIX Tool Layer (VIX-TL) across all platforms.
  • Allow demonstration participants to interact with the nodes being monitored during data capture (e.g., SSH session and web downloads).
  • Capture multiple types of data from each node (including process statistics, resource usage, and network statistics).
  • Demonstrate the configurability of the VMI-based monitoring via a management interface.
  • Integrate with GMOC (i.e., live VMI-captured data from each of the monitored nodes will be passed to GMOC during the demonstration session).
  • Simultaneously provide data a data repository (running in the UA Lab), a web-based interface, to and GMOC. Recent discussion at the GENI I&M workshop highlighted the necessity of supporting multiple data transfer protocols, which this will demonstrate.

The key takeways will include:

  • An understanding of the ability of VIX to unobtrusively monitor virtualized end-nodes on a variety of (GENI-related) virtualization platforms.
  • An understanding of the ability of VIX to monitor virtualized end nodes with little performance penalty. We are currently working on quantifying this performance penalty more precisely, but it is clear that users performing interactive tasks (e.g., shell interaction, HTTP server interaction) on a monitored VM do not perceive any performance degradation from even frequent monitoring efforts.
  • An understanding of the ability of VIX to integrate in the GENI I&M infrastructure using a variety of protocols, some of which will be demonstrated at GEC8. As the GENI I&M platform is still very much a work-in-progress, the important issue at this point is to ensure that the data gathering components are decoupled from the mechanisms by which data will be provided to data consumers, ensuring that whatever protocols are ultimately chosen to be supported in GENI can be added to the VMI system with little delay.