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Comparing openstack and VMware

Conference Paper · October 2014

DOI: 10.1109/ICAECC.2014.7002392

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Comparing Openstack and VMware

Shalmali Suhas Sahasrabudhe Shilpa S. Sonawani

Computer Engineering department. Computer Engineering department.
MAEER’S MIT, Pune MAEER’S MIT, Pune
Pune, India Pune, India

Abstract— Cloud computing platform relies on principle of

sharing of resources. VMware products and OpenStack are the
cloud platforms being used extensively in the industry. Of which
OpenStack is the new competitor, which provides support for
hybrid cloud environment. We compare features of VMware
products and OpenStack in this paper. Resources in cloud
include computing resources, storage and network. These
resources should be allocated and scheduled in a way that user
should get the better performance as well as provider should
achieve high resource utilizations. In this paper, we describe
VMware Distribute Resource Scheduler and OpenStack nova-
scheduler.

Keywords—cloud computing, resource scheduling, VMware

DRS, OpenStack.
I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources.
Infrastructure as a Service is a type of cloud computing which
provides infrastructure as an on-demand service. IT
infrastructure basically includes servers, storage, network and
operating systems.
OpenStack is a cloud computing platform. OpenStack
provides an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and constitutes of
resources such as compute, storage and network resources.
OpenStack is a manager of multiple hypervisors. It is a
collection of tools for managing and orchestrating cloud
resources. VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor but not a Cloud
platform or toolkit. The VMware products that most directly
map to OpenStack are not vSphere or ESXi, but vCloud
Automation Center and vCloud Director. In fact, OpenStack
does not have its own hypervisor but manages different
hypervisors, such as KVM, Xen, Hyper-V, AND ESXi.
In this paper we will survey design, features and scheduling
in OpenStack and VMware ESXi.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
A. OpenStack VMWare ESXi Overview
OpenStack is an open source system. It is fully distributed
system. OpenStack keeps its services as decoupled as possible.
This is designed to provide massive scalability.
Fig.1. Loosely coupled architecture of OpenStack.[12]
• Dashboard aka Horizon provides easy access to
compute, storage and network resources required by
virtual machines. Users can provision and relinquish
resources from horizon.
• Compute aka Nova avails computing services for
creating deleting and managing virtual machines.
• Network aka Neutron provides virtual networking
services to Nova. It allows users to create tenant
specific networks.
• Image aka Glance can store the actual virtual disk
files in the Object Store aka swift
• Identity management service aka Keystone
authenticates and authorizes all components of the
OpenStack.
VMware software suite is a bottom-up structure, the lower
boundary for the Virtual Machine Manager. Like VMware's
VSphere and vCloud director products are dependent on the
free ESXi Virtual Machine Manager. VMware software suite
itself is also fully tested, and has a single deployment
framework. Overall, VMware products because of the
robustness of its structure, many users have used a high- scale
data centers in multiple environments. The vCenter Server can
run database on a separate server; however it doesnot support
distributed architecture. This limits the scalability of vSphere.

 

 


 Manages workload DRS features but
‘intelligently’ by Can be
grouping virtual implemented using
machines, pooling external
resources monitoring,
of physical hosts FilterScheduler and
and prioritizing Live
VMs in these Migration
pools;

Table.1. Comparison of features of VMware and OpenStack

III. VMWARE DRS AND OPENSTACK SCHEDULER

OVERVIEW

Fig.2. Tightly coupled architecture of VMware ESXi [3] Resource Scheduling in cloud is to allocate and schedule
computing resources in a way that providers achieve high
utilization of resources like compute, storage and network and
OpenStack is a Cloud computing platform or toolkit that users meet their performance requirements. This chapter gives
orchestrates various technologies such as storage, networking description of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
and compute, including different hypervisors like KVM, Esxi, and OpenStack Nova-Scheduler.
Hyper-v, Xen etc. ESXi is a hypervisor but not a Cloud VMware DRS dynamically balances load as well as
platform or toolkit. The VMware products that can directly migrates VMs on increasing load to some other hosts.
map to OpenStack is not vSphere or ESXi, but vCloud
Automation Center and vCloud Director. The basic approach Resource allocation in OpenStack mainly deals with
or philosophy of the two is different [9]. Following table shows allocating compute, storage, and network resources to the
comparison of technical and non-technical features of VMware customers instance (Virtual Machine). In OpenStack, nova-
and OpenStack: scheduler makes the important allocation decisions. It currently
works with the Filter-Scheduler and a default
compute_fill_first cost function. The compute_fill_first cost
function calculates host cost based on unallocated host
Feature VMware OpenStack
memory.
Hypervisor Type 1 Type 2
virtualization, virtualization, for
A. VMware DRS
ESXi example - KVM,
ESXi, Hyper-v, VMware® DRS dynamically balances computing capacity
Xen, Baremetal across a collection of resources and intelligently allocates
Customer Access Windows Client, Open API, available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-
defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities
Web console, API Command line,
[8].
Horizon
(Dashboard) On initial placement, DRS makes the assumption that
Network Switching Switching, when a virtual machine being provisioned will use 100% of the
network, NSX for pluggable CPU and memory resources. It does this to ensure that it can
SDN extensions to SDN select a machine with enough resources. If DRS is ascertain
like OVS that the virtual machine cannot be hosted on selected host, it
Storage SAN, iSCSI Pluggable Cinder will make room by using vMotion and moving virtual
Image Catalogs, VM Glance image machines to another more suitable host.
Management templates and service, custom When a virtual machine experiences increased load,
OVF, upload iso to flavors and images VMware DRS first evaluates its priority against the established
Data store can be created resource allocation rules and policies, and if justified, allocates
Costs licensed Open-source additional resources [13]. Resources are allocated to the virtual
Management vCenter cannot Nova – controller machine by migrating it to another server. The live migration
system distribute its can distribute its of virtual machines to different physical servers is executed
services. services. completely transparent to end-users. Live migration is
Scheduler DRS with load Nova-scheduler, implemented by VMotion. VMware DRS can operate in two
balancing features, does not support modes viz. automatic or manual mode. In automatic mode,
VMware DRS makes decision based on best possible
distribution of VMs among the available physical resources. In
manual mode, recommendations about placements of VMs are
given and system administrator takes the final decision DRS
Resource pools can be easily added, removed or
Manages workload
reorganized. If desired, resource pools can be isolated between
‘intelligently’ by grouping
different business units.
virtual machines
B. OpenStack Nova- Scheduler Does pooling of physical
Nova Compute uses the nova-scheduler service which hosts and prioritizes VMs in
selects the compute node to launch a VM. The nova-scheduler, these pools and moves VMs
like vSphere DRS, makes this automatic initial placement for load balancing.
decision using metrics, such as available compute resources. Supports affinity rules
Nova-scheduler cannot do load-balancing tasks or power- governing placement
management of VMs. Also nova-scheduler makes decisions of virtual machines onto
based on static information about compute resources. It does physical hosts.
not consider current utilizations of compute and network
resources. The scheduler has a number of configurable options
and can be modified in the nova.conf file. Collects usage metrics from
physical hosts
and VMs; generates
optimization
recommendations executed
manually or
automatically – on initial
placement or
continuously during runtime.
VMware VMotion executes
live migration of virtual
machines transparently.
Can select particular host to
provision a VM.
Nova-scheduler
Uses availability zone to
group the virtual machines
Not supported
SameHostFilter,
DifferentHostFilter,
GroupAntiAffinityFilter
are used to support
affinity and anti-affinity
rules
Ceilometer can be used to
collect the actual
utilizations of compute
and network resource.
Currently decisions are
taken based on static data
for initial placement.
Dynamic placement is not
supported.
Can be implemented using
external monitoring,
FilterScheduler and Live
Migration.
Cannot select particular
host to launch an instance.

Fig.3. Filter Scheduler [11]
In OpenStack we have following schedulers available:
• Chance Scheduler: This scheduler randomly selects the
host from list of filtered hosts.
• Filter Scheduler: The process of filter scheduler is
divided in two phases. First is filtering phase. In
filtering phase lists of hosts suitable for satisfying the
request is generated. In weighing phase, hosts will be
ranked weighted cost scores given by applying cost
functions. Fig.3. shows the general idea of filter
scheduler.
Table 2 shows comparison of the two schedulers used by
VMware and OpenStack. From the table it can be seen that
OpenStack scheduler is still lacks features like load-balancing,
host selection by user, dynamic placement policy etc.
Table.2. Comparison of VMware DRS and Nova-scheduler
IV. CASE STUDY
To make OpenStack-IaaS enterprise ready some basic service
levels are to be considered. Out of them availability,
performance and security are most important. Availability is
mainly measured by fault tolerance (FT), high availability
(HA) and disaster recovery (DR). Fault tolerance is important
to guarantee availability and reliability of critical services as
well as application execution. Fault tolerance guarantees
highest level of service availability and data protection. High
Availability (HA) is about enabling your systems to protect
against and automatically recover from failures. HA has
business and application continuance. DR is defined as the
"must have" coverage when the HA configuration is
completely unavailable (natural disaster or any unusual
events).
Performance can be measured in terms of applications
response times, transaction latency. Security is the major
concern for IT-applications.
The compute scheduler is responsible for determining on
which compute nodes the instance will be placed based on the
scheduler algorithm and strategies used by the algorithm.
Placement strategies are used for achieving availability,
performance and security levels.
Following two are the examples for implementing placement
strategies.
A. Placement Strategies:
• Availability- Anti affinity :
The GroupAntiAffinityFilter ensures that each
instance in a group is on a different host. Application
VMs should be placed in different ‘failure domains’
to ensure application fault tolerance. That is even if
one of the application VM faces failure, VM in other
domain remains available. This can be achieved by
making server groups and implementing affinity and
anti-affinity policies to these groups.
• Performance :
VMs should be placed as closely as possible on the
network, so as to minimize latency and improve
performance.
• Security :
Resource isolation can be done for security using
server groups along with affinity and anti-affinity
rules.
B. Radware’s Alteon LBaaS for OpenStack Neutron
Radware’s Alteon provides an LBaaS (Load balancer as a
Service) solution natively built into the OpenStack Neutron
LBaaS driver in the Havana version. Alteon significantly
expands open source based load balancing functionality to
offer advanced application delivery services such as SSL
offloading, URI-based traffic steering, L7 policies and
advanced health checks. Radware’s unique solution is based
on dedicated, per-tenant virtual appliance instances ensuring
that tenants are not impacted by each other and that each has
its dedicated capacity and networking resources.
Due to its advanced application delivery services, Alteon
LBaaS for OpenStack provides the following features:
• Per-tenant fault isolation prevents failures of other
services.
• Global server load balancing allows running business
critical applications across cloud and non-cloud
infrastructures without any additional software or
hardware.
• Advanced health monitoring allows custom
definition of fine grained failure scenario
• Alteon solution helps position the OpenStack solution as
a viable alternative to VMware vCloud. By enabling the
OpenStack infrastructure to offer high SLA hosting, the
cloud becomes a viable compute platform for business-
critical applications.
V. CONCLUSION
Cloud Computing is a powerful and flexible software
environment. Comparison between VMware vCloud and
OpenStack is given in this paper. Also paper briefs about the
comparison between powerful resource scheduling systems of
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both VMware and OpenStack. DRS can take care of
automatically placing VMs on a cluster and performing load
balancing across hosts using live migration of VMs (a.k.a.
vMotion). OpenStack scheduler needs an improvement in this
part. With some customizations in the current scheduler
algorithm and Radware’s alteon solution OpenStack can be
used as an alternative to VMware vCloud.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank Department of Computer
Engineering, MAEER’S MIT,Pune, for their encouragement,
extended help and suggestions.
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