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  1. #1

    How to set up your own cloud?

    Has anyone set up a cloud before? What OS do you use?

    I read Ubuntu Server now comes with cloud capabilities and RHEL has had clustering for a long time. How do you data center gurus set up clouds?

  2. #2
    It consists of more than pressing a few buttons, I'll tell you that. It also depends what you understand by "cloud" and what you want to do with it.
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  3. #3
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    In a very simple summary:

    You need to concentrate on the hardware, an array of high end machines connecting to back end SAN storage devices using fiber channel connections. All with a ton of redundancy and great network connections.You then virtualize the entire platform using something like vmware or xen. The OS doesn't really matter , as you can then set-up whatever OS you want.

  4. #4
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    Well my take is this, quite the opposite of sposs

    1. Low spec backend machines, but lots of them.
    2. Iscsi or cluster files system storage
    3. Ubuntu, as 9.10 karmic koala will be brilliant for setting up and managing clouds.
    4. Control panel for frontend/backend management
    5. KVM

  5. #5
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    Is there any detailed guide available to setup Windows and Linux cloud? I need to start selling cloud hosting.
    Prashant T.

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  6. #6
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    I don't think anyone is going to spoon feed you the instructions here, as most are all figuring it out for themselves still. I could be wrong.

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    i'd go with someone like 3tera - or honestly - unless you have very deep pockets just resell another cloud hosting provider.

    In any case I'd forget about coding your own.


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  8. #8
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    I set up an "old fashioned" cloud for the web app my company created.

    2x Ubuntu Servers running heartbeat for IP failover between them, both running HAProxy to load balance traffic to the web servers.
    3x FreeBSD web servers running apache serving the application
    2x FreeBSD database servers running MySQL in Master <-> Master replication for the back end of the application.




    It all depends on what you want to have floating on the "cloud". In our case, the cloud simply is the infrastructure that hosts our web app. In other cases, you can set up the "cloud" to host full operating systems, but then you'll need heavy duty hardware, and a reliable virtualization engine (like Xen or VMWare)

  9. #9
    See: Eucalyptus

    There is also an Ubuntu HOWTO for setting it up

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Eucalyptus

  10. #10
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    I think the better question would be:

    What is your definition of a cloud? What are you trying to achieve?

  11. #11
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    i'd go with someone like 3tera - or honestly - unless you have very deep pockets just resell another cloud hosting provider.

    In any case I'd forget about coding your own.
    I'm definitely up for the challenge of coding one, see you on the other side

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by prashant1979 View Post
    Is there any detailed guide available to setup Windows and Linux cloud? I need to start selling cloud hosting.
    Why sell something you don't know how to make?

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by RackPoint-Morgan View Post
    I think the better question would be:

    What is your definition of a cloud? What are you trying to achieve?
    Exactly. "Cloud" is about as generic of a description as you can get these days and depending on who you talk to (or what vendor) it can mean just about anything.

    What are the goals or problems of your customer base that you're trying to provide solutions for?

    Quote Originally Posted by tshen83 View Post
    Why sell something you don't know how to make?
    Because it's the #1 marketing buzz word right now. It's sort of like the very early days of the dot com era. Everyone wanted to have something on the "web" and throw money every direction to get there, but most had no reason why other than everyone else was doing it.

    There's simply a rush to have a "cloud" product rather than a focus as to why and what customer problem they are attempting to solve and provide an appropriate solution for.
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  14. #14
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    I hate this crap. The word cloud needs to be banned. Half the time, it's being used to describe platforms and products that have existed for YEARS. Suddenly you call it cloud and everybody wants a piece. Not because the thing is new or exciting - mostly because they're sheep and half the time because they don't even know what it is (and once they figure it out, they quietly walk away).

    The other half the time it is describing innovative new technology that is often accessible only via an API or requires you write your own code a specific way or run your programs this new special way (and nobody tells you that until after they've convinced you it's the best thing ever, of course - assuming they even know, the sales guys rarely do), making it completely useless to 90% of the people running around calling out 'I want cloud!' because they read some random article by a journalist who ALSO did not understand what they were talking about at all.

    Argh. Cloud. Argh.

    Oh and the THIRD half (heh) of the time? It's slow. It may be infinitely scalable in whatever ways this particular 'cloud' is, but you pay for it with half-ass access methods that have ridiculous latency or horrendous throughput or computing power you'd be embarrassed to see in a pocket watch. 9 times out of 10, a non-'cloud' setup would have met your needs (because despite what you think, NOTHING you or your company does needs infinite anything) at a lower total cost and been much more efficient. Not to mention fast.

    Oh and the FOURTH half of the time? It turns on and off. And you never turn it off. Because you're growing, or because you cannot be actually bothered to build your application to be capable of knowing when it can and to access their API's to shut down systems/turn off stuff/delete files. Or you got it because it could turn ON really fast and lots at a time - and then you grew at a rate any third-rate hosting company could have easily kept up with.

    Cloud. Argh. Cloud.
    Last edited by Nex7; 09-16-2009 at 09:02 PM.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    I hate this crap. The word cloud needs to be banned. Half the time, it's being used to describe platforms and products that have existed for YEARS. Suddenly you call it cloud and everybody wants a piece. Not because the thing is new or exciting - mostly because they're sheep and half the time because they don't even know what it is (and once they figure it out, they quietly walk away).
    Amen, brother. Amen!

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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    I hate this crap. The word cloud needs to be banned. Half the time, it's being used to describe platforms and products that have existed for YEARS. Suddenly you call it cloud and everybody wants a piece. Not because the thing is new or exciting - mostly because they're sheep and half the time because they don't even know what it is (and once they figure it out, they quietly walk away).

    The other half the time it is describing innovative new technology that is often accessible only via an API or requires you write your own code a specific way or run your programs this new special way (and nobody tells you that until after they've convinced you it's the best thing ever, of course - assuming they even know, the sales guys rarely do), making it completely useless to 90% of the people running around calling out 'I want cloud!' because they read some random article by a journalist who ALSO did not understand what they were talking about at all.

    Argh. Cloud. Argh.

    Oh and the THIRD half (heh) of the time? It's slow. It may be infinitely scalable in whatever ways this particular 'cloud' is, but you pay for it with half-ass access methods that have ridiculous latency or horrendous throughput or computing power you'd be embarrassed to see in a pocket watch. 9 times out of 10, a non-'cloud' setup would have met your needs (because despite what you think, NOTHING you or your company does needs infinite anything) at a lower total cost and been much more efficient. Not to mention fast.

    Oh and the FOURTH half of the time? It turns on and off. And you never turn it off. Because you're growing, or because you cannot be actually bothered to build your application to be capable of knowing when it can and to access their API's to shut down systems/turn off stuff/delete files. Or you got it because it could turn ON really fast and lots at a time - and then you grew at a rate any third-rate hosting company could have easily kept up with.

    Cloud. Argh. Cloud.
    Very well put!
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    I could never understand what defines cloud computing, and what it is really, in tangible terms, supposed to achieve such that it is an advantage over say, a regular VPS.
    Why would you want to have the memory which your OS is using to be split between mutiple machines? Or when would the cloud know that a certain app you're running needs more computing power? Even if it does, when does it kick it? 20% into execution? Halfway? Would it even function better seeing how the processes would need to exchange info/instructions with other machines when the latency is exponentially slower than a regular multi-processor machine?

    IT's the only industry in which you can call smokescreen a synonym of cloud.
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  18. #18
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    Lets try to explain things in simple terms, not 100% accurate in all cases that way, but more simple to understand what we talk about.
    Actually you can call a proper cloud the exact opposite of a VPS - as we know it.

    A VPS is one small slice of a Server. For example you 'cut' the server in 10 'pieces' of VPS and rent out the resources of that VPS (1/10th server). Not exactly right in all cases, since there are overselling possibilities, but to keep it simple, lets explain it like that.

    A Cloud is a virtualization platform that can utilize the resources of multiple servers. So for example i take 100 servers and create a cloud with it. Then i start to rent out resources on that 'cloud'. I could either, like a VPS, limit the resources per customer or even better track the resources a customer used, and bill them on CPU cycles, bandwidth, memory and/or storage a customer used or is using on my cloud.
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  19. #19
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    No offence, but that still looks like the same old literature regurgitated everywhere else.
    I guess it's the lack of control over resources that gives me uneasiness. Sure seems to me that it is possible for an app running in cloud to be running on one server, and its memory allocated from another server. This means the process and the memory has to communicate over the network (not necessarily LAN but any form of interconnection). That cannot be faster than running on a single server or non-oversold VPS, even if the server/VPS has to incur swap activity.
    I still think it would take very niche applications to really need or make good use of a well implemented cloud. Perhaps perfect for encoding a 40GB video and streaming it on the fly etc. And probably not necessary (or even desirable) at all for your regular forums site.
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by ConceptLane View Post
    Sure seems to me that it is possible for an app running in cloud to be running on one server, and its memory allocated from another server. This means the process and the memory has to communicate over the network
    I'm pretty sure this isn't the case. Whilst servers can be moved between 'nodes' in the cloud virtually instantaneously, as you say, it wouldn't work to have the memory and CPU separated over a network connection for many reasons.

    There are lots of reasons to go with a "cloud" provider. For many people, a well specified VPS on a good quality node is suitable, but for others, they need to know that there is plenty of headroom for their application to scale both vertically (within a single node; e.g. to 16GB of RAM) and horizontally (across dozens of nodes, e.g. for load-balancing virtual web servers or clustering a database).

    "Cloud" is a buzzword but to bury your head in the sand (not pointing at anyone, but i've seen people do it) and to not understand the implications (both advantages and disadvantages) for your business and for your client's business of a cloud based solution, you're going to be left behind. You guys seem to be primarily talking about Infrastructure as a Service - but that is just one facet to cloud hosting.
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  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by ConceptLane View Post
    No offence, but that still looks like the same old literature regurgitated everywhere else.
    I guess it's the lack of control over resources that gives me uneasiness. Sure seems to me that it is possible for an app running in cloud to be running on one server, and its memory allocated from another server. This means the process and the memory has to communicate over the network (not necessarily LAN but any form of interconnection). That cannot be faster than running on a single server or non-oversold VPS, even if the server/VPS has to incur swap activity.
    I still think it would take very niche applications to really need or make good use of a well implemented cloud. Perhaps perfect for encoding a 40GB video and streaming it on the fly etc. And probably not necessary (or even desirable) at all for your regular forums site.
    I hear this sort of thing constantly - oh yeah, in the cloud, your app can be using the CPU's from 3 boxes, RAM on 12, HD on 3.. this is not the case. I'm not even aware of a cloud like this. The products that can do things KIND OF like this almost all require that your application be written specifically for them, sometimes in a specific language.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    I hear this sort of thing constantly - oh yeah, in the cloud, your app can be using the CPU's from 3 boxes, RAM on 12, HD on 3.. this is not the case. I'm not even aware of a cloud like this. The products that can do things KIND OF like this almost all require that your application be written specifically for them, sometimes in a specific language.
    Check out my rant in the cloud section: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=884211

    I personally think it's a glimpse of the real cloud not the one marketing folks get so excited about.

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  23. #23
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    We don't use ubuntu.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    I hear this sort of thing constantly - oh yeah, in the cloud, your app can be using the CPU's from 3 boxes, RAM on 12, HD on 3.. this is not the case. I'm not even aware of a cloud like this. The products that can do things KIND OF like this almost all require that your application be written specifically for them, sometimes in a specific language.
    Systems like that are really more parallel processing platforms, and require a ton of custom integration, programming and hard work. Cloud, to me, is nothing more than a large virtualized installation with some nice API's and the ability to shuffle around instances without much more than a slight hiccup to the end user(s).

    It's convenient, its cost effective AND it's better for the environment, but seriously, it's not THAT great. That being said, it is the buzz word and it's what all the venture capitalists are interested in right now. I would say the root technology that is taking off right now and is piggy-backing on cloud technology is SaaS, or software as a service. That's where its at if you ask me -- and thats where a lot of cloud stuff comes into play.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    I hear this sort of thing constantly - oh yeah, in the cloud, your app can be using the CPU's from 3 boxes, RAM on 12, HD on 3.. this is not the case. I'm not even aware of a cloud like this.
    What do you think 'Cloud Sites' etc are?

    Out of the box load balancing and clustering are available right here right now.
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