Eucalyptus is a Linux-based software architecture that creates scalable private and
hybrid
clouds within your existing IT infrastructure. It allows you to provision your own
collections of resources on an as-needed basis.
Eucalyptus provides a virtual network overlay that both isolates network traffic of
different users and allows two or more clusters to appear to belong to the same Local
Area Network (LAN). Eucalyptus also interoperates seamlessly with Amazon’s EC2 and
S3 public cloud services and thus offers the enterprise a hybrid cloud capability.
Eucalyptus Features
Eucalyptus offers ways to implement, manage, and maintain your own collection of virtual
resources (machines, network, and storage). The following is an overview of these
features.
- SSH Key Management
- Eucalyptus employs public and private keypairs to validate your identity when you
log into
VMs using SSH. You can add, describe, and delete keypairs.
- Image Management
- Before running instances, someone must prepare VM images for use in the cloud. This
can be
an administrator or a user. You can bundle, upload, register, describe, download,
unbundle, and deregister VM images.
- Linux-based VM Management
- Eucalyptus lets you run their own VM instances in the cloud. You can run, describe,
terminate, and reboot a wide variety of Linux-based VM instances that were prepared
using
image management commands.
- Windows-based VM Management
- You can run, describe, terminate, reboot, and bundle instances of Windows VMs.
- IP Address Management
- Depending on the networking mode, you might have access to elastic IPs. Elastic IPs
are
public IP addresses that users can reserve and dynamically associate with VM
instances. You can allocate, associate, disassociate, describe, and release IP addresses.
- Security Group Management
- Security groups are sets of firewall rules applied to VM instances associated with
the
group. You can create, describe, delete, authorize, and revoke security groups.
- Volume and Snapshot Management
- Eucalyptus allows you to create dynamic block volumes. A dynamic block volume is similar
to
a raw block storage device that can be used with VM instances. You can create,
attach, detach,
describe, bundle, and delete volumes. You can also create and delete snapshots
of volumes and create new volumes from snapshots.
Who Should Read this Guide?
This guide is for Eucalyptus users who wish to run and manage Linux-based and Windows-based
virtual machines (VMs) within a Eucalyptus cloud.
What’s in this Guide?
This guide contains instructions for users of the Eucalyptus cloud platform. While
these instructions apply generally to all client tools capable of interacting with
Eucalyptus, the primary focus is on the use of Euca2ools (Eucalyptus command line
tools). The following is an overview of the contents of this guide.
