Eucalyptus is a Linux-based cloud platform 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.
