NASA and its Eucalyptus-based Nebula

Here I leave an article from The Register about NASA's Nebula infrastructure cloud. If you don't know yet how NASA's project relates to this blog, read the following paragraph which I quote from the article (Bold font added for emphasis).

"You can think of Nebula as a version of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) that's used only within the federal government, a service that provides on-demand access to scalable processing and storage resources. It's based on Eucalyptus, the open source cloud platform that's bundled with the latest version of Ubuntu. Eucalyptus. Karmic Koala. You get the picture."

I cannot but wonder why NASA chose Eucalyptus to build Nebula...

Some changes...

Hello there,

I am back, posting about some changes that we have made in our cloud...

As we mentioned before, we only have one computer (homer) able to run KVM (due the required virtualization technology). Well... now we are testing bart as our cloud+cc+sc controller and homer as our node controller.

We are also taking the opportunity to test the fresh Ubuntu 10.04 server. So, bart is running a 32 bit version of it and homer is running a 64.
The ubuntu installation is for dummies (us?) and after little time eucalyptus 1.6.2 was running in both machines... without too much effort...

Then, we decided to go back to the issue of running our custom-made VMs. Now using the KVM hypervisor.

Happily, everything that failed before, trying with Xen, worked smoothly with KVM. We took a previous custom VM and it worked at the very first time, proving that the problem was related to Xen and its paravirtualization that needs a special kernel/ramdisk pair in order to run VMs using Eucalyptus.

At least now we don't have this doubt anymore...

Thanks for reading.

Lucio