C3 Lab Mission

The C3Lab Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Our C3Lab currently runs a cloud computing platform set up using OpenNebula (http://opennebula.org/documentation:rel3.4) which is an open-source industry standard for data center virtualization, offering the most feature-rich, flexible solution for comprehensive and complete management of virtualized data centers. The aim of the installed Cloud is not to expose to the world a cloud interface to sell capacity over the Internet, but to provide local cloud users and administrators with a flexible and agile private infrastructure to run virtualized service workloads within the administrative domain. Our C3Lab physical infrastructure adopts a classical cluster-like architecture with a front-end, and a set of hosts where Virtual Machines (VM) will be executed. A physical network joins all the hosts with the front-end.

OpenNebula uses Datastores to handle the Virtual Machines disk Images. In our setup, Datastores are accessible through the front-end using a Network Attached Storage system (NAS) that allows us to store up to 18TB on redundant disk storage.

The following figure shows a simplified view of our C3Lab cloud physical infrastructure. Only the frontend machine is reachable via the public network to allow combining local resources with resources from amazon EC2 or those from a remote Cloud partner infrastructure (such as Cadi Ayyad University Cloud) also running an OpenNebula instance. All other components are connected via a high bandwidth private network.