Managing a Utility Computing Hosting Center with Moab

Moab Workload Manager^®

18.1 Managing a Utility Computing Hosting Center with Moab

Moab enables true utility computing by allowing compute resources to be reserved, allocated, and dynamically provisioned to meet the needs of internal or external workload. Moab is able to respond to either manual or automatically generated requests and can guarantee resource availability subject to existing service level agreement (SLA) or quality of service (QoS) based arrangements.

With Moab's hosting center capabilities, an organization can dynamically control network, compute, application, and storage resources and can dynamically provision operating systems, security, credentials, and other aspects of a complete end-to-end compute environment.

18.1.0 Overview

A hosting center provides scheduled dedicated resources to customers for various purposes and typically has a number of key attributes:

secure remote access
guaranteed resource availability at a fixed time or series of times
tightly integrated auditing/accounting services
varying quality of service levels providing privileged access to a set of users
node image management allowing the hosting center to restore an exact customer-specific or service-specific image before enabling access

This combination of attributes presents unique constraints on a management system. The following describes how Moab is able to effectively manage resources in this environment and provide a full array of services on top of these resources.

Moab's patented utility based computing technology allows a hosting center to quickly harness existing compute resources, dynamically co-allocate the resources, and automatically provision them into a seamless and customized virtual cluster that is either provided to the customer as a complete packaged resource, or is put to work delivering a custom service. Moab's advanced reservation and policy management tools provide support for the establishment of extensive service level agreements, automated billing, and instant chart and report creation.

Moab supports two primary usage models for virtual cluster creation: manual and automatic. In manual mode, using the hosted resources can be as easy as going to a website, specifying what is needed, selecting one of the available options, and logging in when the virtual cluster is activated. In automatic mode, it is even simpler. To use hosted resources, just submit jobs to the local cluster. When the local cluster can no longer provide an adequate level of service, it automatically contacts the utility hosting center, allocates additional nodes, and runs the jobs. The end-user is never aware that the hosting center even exists, but may be aware that the cluster is now bigger and that jobs are being run more quickly.

18.1.0.1 Hosting Center Resources

In most cases, the end goal of a hosting center is to make available to a customer, a complete, secure, packaged environment that allows them to accomplish one or more specific tasks. This packaged environment is called a virtual cluster and may consist of the compute, network, data, software, and other resources required by the customer. For successful operation, these resources must be brought together and provisioned, or configured, to provide a seamless environment that allows customers to quickly and easily accomplish their desired tasks.

18.1.0.2 Hosting Center Customer Interface

The desired operational model for many environments is providing the customer with a fully automated self-service web interface. Once a customer has registered with the host company, access to a hosting center portal is enabled. Through this interface, customers describe their workload requirements, time constraints, and other key pieces of information. The interface communicates with the back-end services to determine when, where, and how the needed virtual cluster can be created and reports back a number of options to the user. The user selects the desired option and can monitor the status of that virtual cluster via web and email updates. When the virtual cluster is ready, web and email notification is provided including access information. The customer logs in and begins working.

18.1.0.3 Hosting Center Policies/Service Level Agreement

Enabling access in a first come first served model provides real benefits, but in many cases customers require reliable resource access with guaranteed responsiveness. These requirements may be any performance, resource, or time based rule such as in the following examples:

I need my virtual cluster within 24 hours of asking.
I want a virtual cluster available from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I want to always have a virtual cluster available and automatically grow/shrink it based on current load.

Quality of service or service level agreement policies allow customers to convert the virtual cluster resources to a strategic part of their business operations greatly increasing the value of these resources. (See activating standby resources.)

18.1.0.4 Hosting Center Administration