Ozone
WSO2 Ozone - Private Cloud in a Box
WSO2 Ozone provides a portal based system for running a Xen-powered private cloud. Ozone has a node controller (running on Dom0) for managing VMs (for starting/stopping/creating DomUs), a cluster controller for managing a set of machines running the node controller and a Web portal to allow a person to start/stop/manage their own VMs.
WSO2 Ozone is implemented in PHP and is very easy to integrate to other environments.
Why not just use Xen?
We do use Xen as the hypervisor. What WSO2 Ozone adds is a simple set of end-user tools for creating and managing the VMs running in the hypervisor.
Why not just use Eucalyptus?
We wanted to, but Eucalyptus currently doesn't support Windows and we desperately needed to be able to run Windows VMs too. Plus, Eucalyptus doesn't have an end-user portal that allowed us to integrate authentication to LDAP, plug into our DNS etc.
Why yet another cloud platform?
WSO2 Ozone is a tool we built because we needed it. Its not a WSO2 product - its just a tool we find very useful and we believe others will too and hence is available as an open source project.
The problem is simple: We needed a bunch of machines for our engineering team to do things like running automated tests, building on different platforms, and have pre-built images of various combinations of our software with different OSs, databases, appservers etc.. We wanted the flexibility to spin up a VM at will. We noticed that we had a few servers that we bought a while ago that were idle for the most part and thought "hmmm, why can't we run a private cloud on those?".
Why not just use Amazon EC2?
First, its not free to use. Here we had a bunch of machines lying around which we have now put into a cluster, beefed up the memory and we can run 30-40 VMs on them with no problem at essentially no cost. In fact, we now want to put the WSO2 Ozone distribution on the few desktops we have (most people use laptops) - anyone can use Dom0 as a regular machine but behind the scenes it could be running a bunch of other VMs too. Even a laptop can be running its own cloud.
Second, what WSO2 Ozone gives you is a full computer - not just CPU+Memory but CPU+Memory+Disk. Yeah, no S3/EBS complication here; each VM gets (obviously a virtual) disk allocated to it. Yes we know that's not as flexible and powerful as S3/EBS, but this works much more simply and is good enough for what we needed.
Third, there's simple things like bandwidth and authentication stuff. Amazon EC2 is great (we're happy users) but we need every person to be able to run their own VMs, with their own credentials and with their own file systems. We need to be able to install stuff that's on our local machines quickly and easily. We need to be able to keep some stuff running even if its not heavily used without worrying about cost. When EC2 is used 24x7 its not inexpensive; its advantage is being able to spin up stuff quickly.
Finally, we're geeks and we like to write stuff.
Is WSO2 Ozone all done?
There are lots of cool features we'd like to see added:
- Add ZeroConf (or similar) based discovery mechanism to dynamically detect new cloud nodes. (Currently you have to manually edit a file and write down the IPs of the Dom0s)
- Improve the ISO image. The one you can download now has base Debian + Xen + Ozone + Gnome so that Dom0 can be used as a real computer. This needs to be automatically built as a nightly build. It needs more flexibility to integrate into the environment of the user (esp. DNS).
- Make the cluster controller and portal more "community aware". Right now you have to manually designate one node as the boss and have it be the one to spin up new VMs on various nodes. It would be cool to be able to go to any Dom0 and have that talk to the other Dom0s and do the work. Or maybe that's YAGNI.
- Support KVM (and maybe even HyperV!) as the hypervisor.
- Implement load balancing across the Ozone nodes.
