Appendix A 281
Click Next to continue. The final screen, shown in Figure A.33, will
ask you to register your product. For now, click on the “I do not want to
register” radio button and click Finish. You can always register your prod-
uct later if you so choose.
The OpenOffice Writer desktop, shown in Figure A.33, will appear.
Figure A.32 Registering OpenOffice: step 3.
Figure A.33 The OpenOffice Writer desktop.
Appendix A.fm Page 281 Tuesday, May 26, 2009 2:08 PM
282 Cloud Computing
That’s it; you can now start working in Writer.
A.6 Summary
This practicum has walked you through setting up another instance of a vir-
tual operating system using the Sun xVM VirtualBox. The process for install-
ing any .vdi file is nearly identical. You should, by now, have enough
confidence in using the VirtualBox to install any or all of the files that are
available for download from the VirtualBox web site at http://virtual-
box.wordpress.com. We encourage you to try some other operating systems
to get an appreciation for what each may be able to provide in terms of setup
and management of a virtual environment. The ability to virtualize can go
from a single host running multiple operating systems to a cluster of hosts
being managed through a single front-end product. Clustering pools of
resources (forming computing grids) enables more efficient use of physical
assets, increasing the overall computing availability for users and providing
resources that would otherwise not be available. So, you may be asking, what
next? How do I use this VirtualBox in a realistic setting?
There are several cloudlike (“Infrastructure-as-a-Service”) technolo-
gies, such as Eucalyptus or Globus Nimbus, that expose remote interfaces
for provision of virtual machines with customized software environments.
These components provide open source alternatives to commercial inter-
faces such as Amazon EC2. One such product is OpenNebula,
1
an open
source distributed VM manager that enables the dynamic placement of
VMs on a pool of physical resources. OpenNebula extends the benefits of
virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of
resources, decoupling the server from the physical infrastructure and the
physical location where it resides. OpenNebula is focused on the efficient,
dynamic, and scalable management of VMs within data centers (i.e., pri-
vate clouds) that involve a large number of virtual and physical servers.
OpenNebula can interface with a remote cloud site, being the only tool
able to access on demand to Amazon EC2 in order to scale out a locally
managed infrastructure. OpenNebula is collaborating with the most rele-
vant cloud projects in order to promote its integration as an alternative
cloud back-end product.
2
1. http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=start.
2. Ibid.
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Appendix A 283
OpenNebula’s latest release, version 1.2, supports Xen and KVM virtu-
alization platforms and also features support for image transfers, cloning,
and virtual network management. The OpenNebula web site provides addi-
tional information about tools for extending the functionality provided by
OpenNebula, such as the Haizea
3
lease management system. Haizea is a
product that, in combination with the OpenNebula virtual infrastructure
manager (VIM), can be used to manage a Xen or KVM
4
cluster, allowing
you to deploy different types of leases that are instantiated as virtual
machines. KVM allows you to run multiple virtual machines (running
unmodified Linux or Windows images), where each virtual machine has
private virtualized hardware (a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc).
Another open source product, libvirt,
5
supports the management of
virtual machines, virtual networks and storage. libvirt is a toolkit that is
used to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of
Linux (and other operating systems). It provides remote management using
TLS encryption and x509 certificates, supports user authentication with
Kerberos and SASL, manages local access control using PolicyKit, supports
zero-conf
6
discovery using Avahi multicast-DNS,
7
and touts a portable cli-
ent API for Linux, Solaris, and Windows. We hope you take time to explore
these solutions further.
3. http://haizea.cs.uchicago.edu.
4. http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki.
5. http://libvirt.org/index.html.
6. Zero configuration (zero-conf) is a set of techniques that automatically creates a usable IP
network without configuration or special servers. The specifications for zero-conf are man-
aged by the IETF.
7. Avahi is a free zero-conf implementation, including a system for multicast DNS/DNS-SD
service discovery. It allows programs to publish and discover services and hosts running on
a local network with no specific configuration.
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