1 / 11

Grid testing using virtual machines

Grid testing using virtual machines. Stephen Childs*, Brian Coghlan, David O'Callaghan, Geoff Quigley, John Walsh Department of Computer Science Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Overview. Description of Grid-Ireland Why use virtual machines? Required components for a VM testbed

haile
Download Presentation

Grid testing using virtual machines

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Grid testing using virtual machines Stephen Childs*, Brian Coghlan, David O'Callaghan, Geoff Quigley, John Walsh Department of Computer Science Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

  2. Overview • Description of Grid-Ireland • Why use virtual machines? • Required components for a VM testbed • Design of TCD TestGrid system • Using the TestGridBuilder • Conclusion and future plans

  3. Grid-Ireland • Irish National Computational Grid • 6 sites now, 17 sites by Feb’05 • Grid Operations Centre at TCD • Homogeneous core infrastructure: • 1 grid gateway per site composed of FW/LCFG/CE/SE/UI/MON/NM • Heterogeneous compute resources: • RH 7.3, RH 9, FC 2, AIX, IRIX

  4. Why use VMs for Grid testing? • Need a realistic test environment • Deployment: test new releases on replica sites before roll-out (n*gateways) • Middleware development: want a full site image to play with (gateway + n*WNs) • Porting: to different distros (n machines) • that’s cost-effective and easy to use • VMs make good use of hardware budget • Fewer machines = easier management

  5. VM applications

  6. Aims of TCD TestGrid • Support fast creation of new VMs based on standard configurations • Provide developers with an interface for configuring and creating VMs • Facilitate construction of multiple test sites and clusters • Creation of new sites • Addition of nodes to existing sites

  7. Required components Xen: command-line and Web interfaces, low overhead, supports patched Linux kernels LVM: snapshots allow copy-on-write FS images LCFG: profile controls network config, package installation, etc.

  8. System design • File system: • Library of FS images stored on VM host • Each new VM takes a copy-on-write snapshot of a base image • Networking: • VM eth0 bridged onto real NIC • IPs specified by user or allocated from site pool • LCFG profile based on node type and site • Web interface for configuring new VMs

  9. System design Physical machine

  10. Creating a new worker node VM System User Set node type and other params via web Create new profile from WN template Create new snapshot of WN file system Configure network settings, copy profile Boot new VM with appropriate options Log in using Xen console or ssh

  11. Conclusions and future work • VMs allow developers to build new test environments quickly • Evaluation of components: • LVM snapshots almost production-ready • Xen performance is impressive • LCFG adequate now; quattor the way forward • UI needs more work and user feedback • Need to integrate GridSite for security • Work on networking ongoing

More Related