[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 4 – Image Management

Chapter 3 Web Interface

Chapter 5 Instance Management

Eucalyptus Machine Image(EMI)

A Eucalpyptus Machine Image(EMI) is a combination of a virtual disk image(s), kernel and ramdisk images as well as an xml file containing meta data about the image. These images reside on WS3 and used as templates for creating instances on UEC. Each Linux EMI is a combination of the following:

• An XML file with a name like “karmic.img.manifest.xml” with information about one or more hard disk images, a kernel image and a ram disk image (id – emi-65440E7E)
• An XML file with a name like “vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-server.manifest.xml” with information about the corresponding kernel image(id – eki-39FC1244)
• An XML file with a name like “initrd.img-2.6.28-11-server.manifest.xml” with information about the corresponding ramdisk image(id – eri-71ED1322)

Each of these images has its own ID that can be used while running the instances. More on this in the chapter on “Managing Instances”

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 8 – Security

Chapter 7 Network Management

Chapter 9 Troubleshooting

Eucalyptus provides ingress filtering for the instances based on the concept of security groups. A Security Group is a named set of rules that Eucalyptus applies to the incoming packets for the instances in Managed and Managed-NOVLAN modes. You can specify a security group while launching an instance. Each security group can have multiple rules associated with it. Each rule specifies the source IP/network, protocol type, destination ports etc. Any packet matching these parameters specified in a rule is allowed in. Rest of the packets are blocked.

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 3 – Web Interface

Chapter 2 Installation & Configuration

Chapter 4 Image Management

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud provides a minimal web interface to manage user credentials, manage images, administer user accounts, etc.

In our sample setup, the web interface is accessible at:

https://192.168.10.121:8443/

You have already finished setting up the password for the admin user of the web interface while working on Desktop1 in the chapter on “Installation & Configuration”.

A user trying to access the interface for the first time, would need to sign up and would be able to use the interface after the account is approved by the administrator. The approval of the account by the administrator results in an emal to the user.

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 6 – Storage Management

Chapter 5 Instance Management

Chapter 7 Network Management

Storage Controller

Storage Controller is the component of Eucalyptus that provides persistent block storage compatible with Amazon’s Elastic Block Store. euca2ools or EC2 commands can be used to manage these volumes. Here are a few euca commands for managing the volumes

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 1 – Introduction to UEC and its components

Chapter 2 Installation & Configuration

Cloud

Cloud Computing is a computing model, where resources such as computing power, storage, network and software are abstracted and provided as services on the Internet in a remotely accessible fashion. Billing models for these services are generally similar to the ones adopted for public utilities. On-demand availability, ease of provisioning, dynamic and virtually infinite scalability are some of the key attributes of Cloud Computing.

An infrastructure setup using the cloud computing model is generally referred to as ‘Cloud’. The following are the broad categories of services available on the ‘Cloud’:

1. Infrastructure As A Services (IAAS)
2. Platform As A Service (PAAS)
3. Software As A Service (SAAS)

This ‘Cloud’ is generally available as service to anyone on the Internet. However, a variant called ‘Private Cloud’ is increasingly becoming popular for private infrastructure that has some of the attributes of the ‘Cloud’ as mentioned above.

Amazon Web Services is one of the major players providing IAAS. They have 2 popular services – Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) and Simple Storage Service(S3). These services are available through web services interfaces. The client tools can use EC2 and S3 APIs to communicate with these services. The popularity of these APIs have encouraged other Cloud products to provide support for them as well.

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 11 – Hacks

Chapter 10 Euca Commands

Bringing up a windows instance without using kernel and ramdisk images

Edit /usr/share/eucalyptus/gen_kvm_libvirt_xml to  remove the lines that add “-kernel” and “-initrd” options in the libvirt.xml.

Here is the patch for /usr/share/eucalyptus/gen_kvm_libvirt_xml that ships with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

DISCLAIMER: This patch works  with the windows instances  on Lucid Lynx. This would work as long as all your disk images are bootable and you don’t need the kernel and ramdisk images. If you need the flexibility of launching instances using different kernel/ramdisk combinations, this hack is not for you!

[Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition] Chapter 10 – Euca Commands

Chapter 9  Troubleshooting

Chapter 11 Hacks

Commands from euca2ools

Image Management

euca-bundle-image

Bundles an image for use with Eucalyptus or Amazon EC2.