Virtualisati on within the Telecommunications Software and Systems

Virtualisati on within the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). Presented by John Ronan

Virtualisation in TSSG Introduction to the TSSG Telecommunications Software & Systems Group is a world class communications software research centre based at WIT • • • Founded in 1996 by Dr. Willie Donnelly (approx 20 Million EUR in funding 1996 -2006) Partner base of over 150 active funded partners including Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Lucent, … (Vendors); Vodafone, O 2, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Swisscom, BT, … (Operators); LSE, UCL, TCD, … (Academia) – largest Irish EU funded institution for IST FP 5/FP 6/FP 7 (potentially in Call 1) and for e. TEN – largest EI commercialisation fund success for a single research centre Balanced portfolio of: – basic research projects (3) – faculty (5) postdocs (6) students (14) – applied research projects (14) – staff (25) – pre-product development projects (14) – staff (50) 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG The Problem • • • The EU IST Daidalos project needed a test bed to be established and this responsibility fell to the TSSG. Required at least 6 machines all networked together with the possibility of this scaling. Cost / Space / Performance all were issues 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG The Solution • A number of solutions were considered including: – – Purchase 6 workstations and more as required. Buy two micro-processor Blade Servers. A clustering approach on several existing machines A virtual solution. • Xen • vmware We opted for the virtual server option that Xen offered as we were more ‘comfortable’ in the Linux environment. 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG Why choose virtualisation and Xen – Virtualisation has many benefits: • Save space • Save money on associated costs (powering 6 machines for a year) • Maximise hardware performance – Xen was chosen because: • It is entirely open source • It can virtualise several different OS simultaneously within one host OS (e. g. a 64 bit guest could be run on a 32 bit host) 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG What is Xen is a free open-source virtual machine monitor. • It is software that runs on a host operating system allowing several guest operating systems to run on top of that host operating system utilising the computer hardware for near native performance. • It is supported by every major OS, server and silicon vendor including the likes of Dell, Cisco, Intel, AMD and soon Microsoft (Windows Server 2009). • Xen can handle both paravirtualisation OSs and unmodified i. e. fully virtualised OSs. • 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG Why use Xen? It is scaleable, your hardware limits what Xen can do. • It maximises the server’s resource utilisation and can do the job of several servers in one with near native performance. • It can perform live migrations of host’s from one machine to another leaving it very flexible for maintenance (with caveats). • 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG The Implementaion • The following setup was desired for the test-bed implementation: 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG The Implementaion The laptop/sunray thin clients would be the tester’s interface into the Xen virtual machines. • Each of the 6 created machines would have their own unique address (IPv 4 and IPv 6) and resources allocated to them. • Making them seem like independent machines to the outside world. • 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG The Implementation The machine that would be utilised as the Xen server would need to be a powerful enough machine to allow for the possibility of the test-bed scaling in the future. A DL 380 2. 8 Ghz XEON server with 2 GB RAM was chosen. • The machine was taken and installed with a Debian version of the Linux OS. • The latest stable version of the Xen Software (3. 0. 1) was installed onto this machine and a default Linux image was created. • 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org

Virtualisation in TSSG Q&A Thank you for your attention and for more information please contact: Mr John Ronan: mailto: jronan@tssg. org 16 th November 2007 http: //www. tssg. org