The CloudLab Manual

2024-09-25 (88bcab0)

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The CloudLab Manual

The CloudLab Team

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Acceptable Use Policy

CloudLab is a "meta-cloud"—that is, it is not a cloud itself; rather, it is a facility for building clouds. It provides bare-metal access and control over a substantial set of computing, storage, and networking resources; on top of this platform, users can install standard cloud software stacks, modify them, or create entirely new ones.

The current CloudLab deployment consists of more than 33,000 cores in over 1800 allocatable nodes distributed across three sites at the University of Wisconsin, Clemson University, and the University of Utah. CloudLab interoperates with existing testbeds including GENI and Emulab, to take advantage of hardware at dozens of sites around the world.

The control software for CloudLab is open source, and is built on the foundation established for Emulab, GENI, and Apt. Pointers to the details of this control system can be found on CloudLab’s technology page.

1 Getting Started

2 CloudLab Users

2.1 Register for an Account

2.1.1 Join an existing project

2.1.2 Create a new project

2.1.3 Setting up SSH access

2.1.4 Setting up X11

3 CloudLab and Repeatable Research

3.1 CloudLab For Artifact Evaluation

3.1.1 For Authors

3.1.2 For AEC Chairs

3.1.3 For AEC Members

4 Creating Profiles

4.1 Creating a profile from an existing one

4.1.1 Preparation and precautions

4.1.2 Cloning a Profile

4.1.3 Copying a Profile

4.1.4 Creating the Profile

4.1.5 Updating a profile

4.2 Creating a profile with a GUI

4.3 Repository-Based Profiles

4.3.1 Updating Repository-Based Profiles

4.3.2 Branches and Tags in Repository-Based Profiles

4.4 Creating a profile from scratch

4.5 Sharing Profiles

4.6 Versioned Profiles

5 Basic Concepts

5.1.1 On-demand Profiles

5.1.2 Persistent Profiles

5.2 Experiments

5.2.1 Extending Experiments

5.4 Physical Machines

5.5 Virtual Machines

6 CloudLab for Classes

6.1 Creating Your Project on CloudLab

6.2 Having Students Join Your Project

6.3 Project-Based Classes

6.4 Assignment-Based Classes

7 Resource Reservations

7.1 What Reservations Guarantee

7.2 How Reservations May Affect You

7.3 Making a Reservation

7.4 Using a Reservation

7.5 Who Shares Access to Reservations

8 Describing a profile with python and geni-lib

8.1 A single XEN VM node

8.2 A single physical host

8.3 Two XenVM nodes with a link between them

8.4 Two ARM64 servers in a LAN

8.5 A VM with a custom size

8.6 Set a specific IP address on each node

8.7 Specify an operating system and set install and execute scripts

8.8 Profiles with user-specified parameters

8.9 Add storage to a node

8.10 Debugging geni-lib profile scripts

9 Virtual Machines

9.1.1 Controlling CPU and Memory

9.1.2 Controlling Disk Space

9.1.3 Setting HVM Mode

9.1.4 Dedicated and Shared VMs

10 Storage Mechanisms

10.1 Overview of Storage Mechanisms

10.2 Node-Local Storage

10.2.1 Specifying Storage in a Profile – Local Datasets

10.2.2 Allocating Storage in a Running Experiment

10.2.3 Persisting Local Data

10.3 Image-backed Datasets

10.4 Remote Datasets

10.5 NFS Shared Filesystems

10.6 Storage Type Summary (TL;DR)

10.7 Example Storage Profiles

10.7.1 Creating a Node-local Dataset

10.7.2 Creating an Image-backed Dataset from a Node-local Dataset

10.7.3 Using and Updating an Image-backed Dataset

10.7.4 Creating a Remote Dataset

10.7.5 Using a Remote Dataset on a Single Node

10.7.6 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via a Shared Filesystem

10.7.7 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via Clones

11 Advanced Topics

11.1 Disk Images

11.3 Public IP Access

11.3.1 Dynamic Public IP Addresses

11.5 Introspection

11.5.1 Client ID

11.5.2 Control MAC

11.5.3 Manifest

11.5.4 Private key

11.5.5 Profile parameters

11.6 User-controlled switches and layer-1 topologies

11.7 Portal API

12.1 CloudLab Utah

12.2 CloudLab Wisconsin

12.3 CloudLab Clemson

12.4 Apt Cluster

13 CloudLab Kubernetes Tutorial

13.1 Objectives

13.2 Prerequisites

15.4 Logging In

13.4 Building Your Own Kubernetes Cluter

13.5 Exploring Your Experiment

13.5.1 Experiment Status

13.5.2 Profile Instructions

13.5.3 Topology View

13.5.4 List View

13.5.5 Manifest View

13.5.6 Graphs View

13.5.8 Web-based Shell

13.5.9 Serial Console

13.6 Exploring Kubernetes

13.6.1 Kubernetes Dashboard

13.6.2 Kubernetes Dashboard

13.7 Terminating the Experiment

13.8 Taking Next Steps

14 CloudLab OpenStack Tutorial

14.1 Objectives

14.2 Prerequisites

15.4 Logging In

14.4 Building Your Own OpenStack Cloud

14.5 Exploring Your Experiment

14.5.1 Experiment Status

14.5.2 Profile Instructions

14.5.3 Topology View

14.5.4 List View

14.5.5 Manifest View

14.5.6 Graphs View

14.5.8 Web-based Shell

14.5.9 Serial Console

14.6 Bringing up Instances in OpenStack

14.7 Administering OpenStack

14.7.1 Log Into The Control Nodes

14.7.2 Reboot the Compute Node

14.8 Terminating the Experiment

14.9 Taking Next Steps

15 CloudLab Chef Tutorial

15.1 Objectives

15.2 Motivation

15.3 Prerequisites

15.4 Logging In

15.5 Launching Chef Experiments

15.6 Exploring Your Experiment

15.6.1 Experiment Status

15.6.2 Profile Instructions

15.6.3 Topology View

15.6.4 List View

15.6.5 Manifest View

15.7 Brief Introduction to Chef

15.8 Logging in to the Chef Web Console

15.8.1 Web-based Shell

15.8.2 Chef Web Console

15.9 Configuring NFS

15.9.1 Exploring The Structure

15.10 Apache Web Server and ApacheBench Benchmarking tool

15.10.1 Understanding the Internals

15.11 Final Remarks about Chef on CloudLab

15.12 Terminating Your Experiment

15.13 Future Steps

16 Citing CloudLab

17 Getting Help

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