| By Ignacio M. Llorente |
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| July 6, 2009 03:15 PM EDT |
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In my post "Interfaces for Private and Public Cloud Computing", I briefly described the main differences between public and private cloud computing from the perspective of their different application scope and interfaces. My position was that a private cloud interface should provide rich enough semantics, far beyond of that provided by public clouds (such as Amazon EC2 APIs), to ease the integration of the distributed virtual infrastructure in the data-center management stack, including user and administration support. Such interface should provide additional functionality for virtualization, networking, image and physical resource configuration, management, monitoring and accounting, not exposed by pubic cloud interfaces.
I also envisioned that, although conceived as a library to interface with different virtualization technologies, the libvirt virtualization API could be used as interface for private cloud computing. This vision is now a reality, libvirt version 0.6.5 was released last week including an OpenNebula driver that provides a libvirt interface to a distributed virtual infrastructure consisting of local resources running VMware, KVM or Xen; and Cloud resources on Amazon EC2 or ElasticHosts.
As Rubén S. Montero describes in his post "Libvirt 0.6.5 Released… Including a OpenNebula Driver": "Libvirt is evolving into a very rich and widely used interface to manage the virtualization capabilities of a server, including virtual network, storage and domain management. So, libvirt can be a very effective administration interface for a private cloud exposing a complete set of VM and physical node operations. In this way, libvirt + OpenNebula provides a powerful abstraction for your private cloud."
Ignacio M. Llorente, Ph.D in Computer Science and Executive MBA, is a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology, and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid. He has held several appointments as an independent expert for the European Commission (Information Society and Media Directorate-General); visiting positions at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA); consultancy positions with Sun Microsystems; and a Senior Researcher position in the Advanced Computing Lab at CAB (associated to NASA Astrobiology Institute).
He has 17 years of experience in research and development of advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms, and management of international projects and initiatives on Grid and Cloud computing; having led the research group in 15 sponsored projects; and having published more than 130 scientific papers in the leading journals and proceedings books.
He is currently co-leading the research and development of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, the Globus GridWay Metascheduler, and the Grid4Utility initiative for federation of Grids. He participates in the EGEE and BEinGRID European projects, as UCM partner responsible, and in the Globus Alliance, as chair of one of its projects; and coordinates the Activity on Management of Virtual Execution Environments in the RESERVOIR Project, main EU-funded research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. He is the Grid Community Liaison Coordinator for the Service Oriented Infrastructure Working Group of NESSI; and co-chairs the OGF Working Group on Open Cloud Computing Interface. He coordinates the Middleware Activity in the Spanish Initiative in e-Science and the Working Group on Service Oriented Infrastructures and Grids of INES.
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