Cloud bursting with HP CloudSystem Matrix infrastructure orchestration and HP Cloud Services or Amazon EC2
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Overview
What is CloudSystem bursting?
Public cloud bursting is a feature of HP CloudSystem Matrix that enables enterprises to provision public and private
infrastructure resources seamlessly. Combined with CloudSystem‟s powerful private cloud management capabilities,
the ability to „burst‟ beyond the private cloud environment and to leverage infrastructure resources offered by external
cloud service providers, creates a virtually unlimited pool of hybrid cloud resources for CloudSystem users to draw
upon for cloud service delivery.
The current bursting destinations for CloudSystem are HP Cloud Services (HPCS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2), and Savvis. Bursting to Savvis is described in the Cloud bursting with HP CloudSystem Matrix infrastructure
orchestration and Savvis white paper. HP Cloud Services and Amazon EC2 are described in the following sections,
and bursting to these destinations is the topic of this white paper. Over the coming months and years, look for an
expanding ecosystem of bursting destinations that will include HP CloudAgile bursting partners.
HP Cloud Services
HP Cloud Services provides public cloud infrastructure, platform services, and cloud solutions for developers,
independent software vendors (ISVs) and businesses. Designed with OpenStack technology at the core, HP Cloud
Services‟ architecture ensures no vendor lock-in, improves developer productivity, features easy-to-use tools for faster
time to code, provides access to a rich partner ecosystem, and is backed by exceptional customer support. HP Cloud
Services‟ initial public cloud services offerings include on-demand compute instances or virtual machines, scalable
online storage capacity and accelerated delivery of cached content to end users. HP‟s full suite of public cloud
services will enable the next generation of web services to be built, run and scaled on a global basis backed with a
broad marketplace of analytics, tools, and services. For more information, see http://hpcloud.com/.
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-
scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to
use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom
application environment, manage your network‟s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few
systems as you desire. For more information, see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
CloudSystem Matrix bursting concepts and capabilities
Provisioning
CloudSystem interfaces to the public cloud provider (HPCS or EC2) to perform provisioning. The public cloud
provider provisions servers and storage, deploys images, and networks service components together in much the
same way that CloudSystem provisioning occurs, using resources located at the public cloud data center.
Inventory
Resources accessible via HP Cloud Services and Amazon EC2 accounts are represented as Cloud Resources
inside CloudSystem Matrix. Cloud Resources can be added to a server pool in the same way as any other VM
Host or ESX Resource Pool.
Cloud Resources do not have an upper capacity limit (unlike VM Hosts, which can run out of memory and disk
space). Capacity limits are enforced by the provider and limit related errors may be reported during
provisioning. The cloud provider account holder must apply to raise resource limits, if necessary, to meet the
needs of services to be provisioned.
Each Cloud Resource corresponds to a single cloud provider region.
A CloudSystem server pool can include on-premise resources or public Cloud Resources, but not both.
HP Cloud Services server images and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are displayed in the CloudSystem
software inventory. You can choose from the collection of pre-existing publically available images and optional
private images you create in your account. An image filter configuration determines which images are visible to
CloudSystem.
Server types
Cloud providers generally limit server configurations to a discrete set of server types. A server type (called
“flavor” in HPCS and “instance type” in EC2) defines the processor and memory characteristics for the server,
and perhaps other attributes such as processor architecture.