Image Management for Cloud/HPC Infrastructure with OpenNebula

FutureGrid (FG) is a testbed providing users with grid, cloud, and high performance computing infrastructures. FG employs both virtualized and non-virtualized infrastructures. Within the FG project, we offer different IaaS frameworks as well as high performance computing infrastructures by allowing users to explore them as part of the FG testbed.

To ease the use of these infrastructures, as part of performance experiments, we have designed an image management framework, which allows us to create user defined software stacks based on abstract image management and uniform image registration. Consequently, users can create their own customized environments very easily. The complex processes of the underlying infrastructures are managed by our software tools and services. These software tools are not only able to manage images for IaaS frameworks, but they also allow the registration and deployment of images onto bare-metal by the user. This level of functionality is typically not offered in a HPC (high performance computing) infrastructure. Therefore, our approach changes the paradigm of administrator-controlled dynamic provisioning to user-controlled dynamic provisioning, which we also call raining. Thus, users obtain access to a testbed with the ability to manage state-of-the-art software stacks that would otherwise not be supported in typical compute centers. Security is also considered by vetting images before they are registered in a infrastructure.