How Utility Computing Enabled

ഹൌ ഉതിളിടി കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് എനബ്ലെദ്

Utility computing has gained considerable popularity over the past eighteen months as businesses big and small seek to take advantage of the flexibility the new computing model offers.

Virtualization is commonly used for server consolidation, carving physical servers into smaller virtual machines (VM) that can be used as if they were real servers.

Server virtualization solutions like VMware and Xen are used for this purpose

Virtualization by itself, however, is not a complete utility computing solution. However, there are two commercial utility computing solutions based on virtualization that are more than a year old now, Amazon’s EC2 and 3tera’s AppLogic.

Therefore, we can start to evaluate the required elements of a successful utility computing solution based on those services. The rest of this article is a list of services required beyond virtualization in order to build a utility computing system.

1. Storage

Storage is easily the biggest hurdle to utility computing, and if poorly architected can affect cost, performance, scalability and portability of the system.

2. Network virtualization

When installing software on a physical server or virtual machine it’s normal practice for each system to be configured with the name or IP addresses of numerous other resources within the data center.

3. Scheduling

As users start their applications, the utility system needs a scheduling mechanism that determines where virtual machines will run on available hardware resources. The scheduler must deal not only with CPU and memory, but also with storage and network capacity across the entire system.

4. Image management

Experienced users of virtualization have observed how the number of images can seemingly explode. Utility systems need to provide image management that allows users to organize their images and easily deal with version control across the system

5. VM configuration

The tremendous increase in the number of images also exacerbates the manual configuration of virtual machines. Unlike physical servers which are usually configured carefully once and then ideally left alone for a long time, in utility computing systems VMs are frequently moved around and reconfigured, restarted or shut down

6. IP address allocation

IP address assignment can create bindings between virtual machines, yet applications often require static IP addresses for public facing interfaces.

7. Monitoring/high availability

With applications running on a utility computing service, system administrators still need to be able to monitor operations and create systems that offer high availability.

Extended services

The preceding 7 services are those clearly recognizable as being required for basic utility computing based on existing commercial utility computing systems, but it’s not a complete list of possible innovations. Other services may be needed in order to build commercially viable systems. Here are few examples:

• import/export of VMs, including multiple VMs and their configuration, in a way that can be recovered elsewhere
• dynamic resizing of VMs, handling live migration and its interactions with the storage systems

In summary, the current level of virtualization technologies is inadequate to support and deliver true utility computing systems.