FermiCloud Home Page

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Introduction

FermiCloud is a private cloud providing Infrastructure-as-a-service services to Fermilab employees and users. FermiCloud encompasses the FermiCloud Services, which are a pilot service at this time available to stakeholders of the project, and the FermiCloud Project which continues to investigate and develop cloud technology to come up with a combination of open-source services which is usable and reliable.

FermiCloud Services

As of October 1, 2010, FermiCloud Services are now officially available as a pilot service. All current users of the pilot service are using our OpenNebula deployment, although we still have a Nimbus installation available as well. We have nine of our production machines running the OpenNebula system and seven running the Nimbus system, with the balance of machines reserved for the Grid Storage Evaluation project which is still ongoing and is a hardware-contributing stakeholder to FermiCloud.

Virtual machine with variable public IP

You can launch a virtual machine at your command and it will come up with a publicly addressible IP which is one of a pre-set list of IP's fermicloud001-fermicloud060. Automatic script will fetch the kerberos keytab and host certificate (if applicable) so you will be able to log in as non-privileged user or as root via kerberos ssh. This is currently available on the OpenNebula system.

Virtual machine with fixed public IP

You can launch a standard virtual machine image. By means of attaching a small .iso image at launch time we can use scripts to contextualize the system IP to a fixed value and send the appropriate system-dependent files along with it. This is available on the OpenNebula cluster. You must have authorization in advance to get the static IP created. Once you have the authorization, follow the instructions here

Virtual machine with private IP optionally routable to public IP

Please consult FermiCloud services if you need this feature, which is an emulation of the "Elastic IP" service of EC2.

Virtual machine with public and private IP

It is possible to launch a virtual machine with both public and private IP, see the OpenNebula instructions below.

Coordinated cluster of virtual machines with one public/private and the rest private-only.

We have a sample cluster of one public-private and several private-only virtual machines running on the OpenNebula cluster right now. At the moment some administration intervention is necessary to create a dedicated private subnet for these clusters when they are requested.

Acceptable use policy

The Fermilab Policy on Computing applies to virtual machines on FermiCloud as it does for any other machines on site. Currently the base FermiCloud infrastructure operates under the Open Science Enclave policy and so virtual machines installed on the cloud need to do so as well. This means that only supported versions of Fermilab-supported operating systems (Sci. Linux Fermi LTS4, Sci. Linux Fermi 5, Fermi STS, and Windows) can be run on the cloud, that patch levels and kernels must be kept up to date, and all policies on restricted network services apply. Requests for waivers must be placed with the CSEXEC. FermiCloud is, at the moment, a resource for Fermilab employees and users only.

Service level agreement

Users of FermiCloud agree that FermiCloud is a pilot service. Due to rapid software evolution, requirements for patching, and stability issues in experimental software, restart of the cloud management software and the virtual machines may happen at any time without notice. OpenNebula provides options to have the contents of your virtual machine saved automatically if that should happen. Details are in the documentation below. We will attempt to notify users on the cloud in advance of a reboot. Problems in launching a virtual machine or in logging into a virtual machine will be supported on a best-effort basis.

The FermiCloud Project

The FermiCloud Project is responsible for technology evaluation and design of FermiCloud. A report, currently will soon be available in docdb on the results of our evaluation and design phase. We expect to release our CHEP poster next week as well, as well as our year two program of work shortly.

Meeting schedule

Every Tuesday from 11AM to 12 PM, Wilson Hall 5 West, Meeting phone-in ID ESNET 1-510-665-5437 meeting ID CLOUD 25683.

Link to Project document

Docdb document 3302

Link to OpenNebula User Document

OpenNebula User Doc

FermiCloud Machine Organization

FermiCloud Machine Organization

New production hardware

New production hardware arrived on May 18, 2010 We have 23 of the above machines. Allocation of production hardware is as follows:

Usage Plots

FermiCloud Usage Plots

Publications and talks

Steve Timm's talk at CERN June 22 cern2010talk.pdf

Keith Chadwick's talk at the Fall 2010 HEPiX held on 05-Nov-2010

Steve Timm's computing techniques Seminar Dec. 9, 2010

Fermi-only version of Steve Timm's slides as shown Dec. 9

CHEP poster on authorization/authentication in FermiCloud

FermiCloud talk as presented by Keith Chadwick at HEPiX

Soon to come