Energy Optimizing Cloud Manager – Follow the Wind & Sun

The GSN Project will implement an energy-optimizing cloud manager. The cloud manager will be capable of moving running VMs between nodes. Some of the nodes will be on the power grid, and some off. The off-grid nodes will be green – either wind or solar powered. Some of the ongrid nodes will be green – e.g. hydro power, and some may be more carbon intensive. The cloud manager will opportunistically push VMs from to those off-grid nodes having sufficient renewable power to operate, and will ensure the survival of these VMs by pulling them back to on-grid nodes as power dwindles at the renewable power node. Follow the sun & wind cloud management is a central goal for the GSN Project. The first approaches will be conservatively manage VM survival, thereby underutilizing the off-grid nodes. Based on this experience, the manager will be augmented to better utilize these nodes. Finally, a coss-domain “grid of clouds” management strategy will be developed.

1. Architecture

Figure 10: Management controller for renewable energy optimization

Figure 10 shows the architecture for a within-domain energy optimizing cloud manager. Note that storage is centralized at an on-grid node. This is because VM survival at off-grid nodes will entail a rapid exit as power dwindles, and therefore one needs to minimize the required data transfer volume.

Figure 11: Hub and spoke topology

The energy optimizing cloud manager will ultimately be independent of network topology. However, as a starting point the project will consider star topologies – with a central on-grid hub node and one or more off-grid spoke nodes.

Figure 12: Migration of virtualized ICT services between hub and spokes

Services are moved from hub to spoke when wind power is available; services are moved back to always-available hub when wind power is not available. Migration of virtualized services is transparent to their users.

2. Tools

The energy optimization module for cloud managements will be custom built tool created in Java, Python or Scala and available as a OSGi service bundle that working with IaaS based resources.