Nimbus

DEPRECATED: The most recent version is Nimbus TP2.1

Version TP1.3.3.1 - VWS Technology Preview 1.3.3.1

This is a technology preview of the virtual machine based Workspace Service (VWS). The workspace service provides a gateway to a set of resources configured with the Xen (2.0.7 or 3.x) implementation of virtual machines.

See the Features page for general information on VWS functionality. See below for detailed documentation options that explain the functionality and configurations in detail.

You can download the software from the downloads page.

A set of VMM resources may be managed entirely by the workspace service or alternatively integrated with a site's resource manager (such as PBS) using the workspace pilot. This way a dual use grid cluster can be achieved: regular grid jobs can run on the VMM node with no guest VMs, unless the node is at that time allocated to the workspace service. The site resource manager maintains full control over the cluster and does not need to be modified.

TP1.3.3 --> TP1.3.3.1

A bugfix listed in the TP1.3.3 changelog did not make into cvs properly before release. If you downloaded the TP1.3.3 tarballs, you should download the replacement TP1.3.3.1 service-src tarball.

Documentation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tom Howe, Marlon Peirce, John Bresnahan, Doug Olson, Levente Hajdu, Martin Feller, Tina Hoffa, William Voorsluys, and Mauricio Tsugawa for their valuable suggestions, bug reports, and help with pre-release testing.

Changes in TP1.3.3.1 (vs. TP1.3.2)

• Introduction of support for contextualization with virtual clusters. See the clouds page and the new one-click clusters page to see the various new features in action.

• New ensemble service report operation allows efficient queries about a large number of workspaces.

• Support for storing images at the repository in gzip format and retrieving them from the repository in gzip format. This can save a lot of time in cluster situations.

• Support for pegging the number of vcpus clients receive.

• Various client enhancements including internal organization, cleaner output, and new commandline options. Embedded security tools (like grid-proxy-init) work more out of the box now.

• No configuration migrations are necessary for moving to this version from TP1.3.2. Some configuration additions will be necessary if you'd like to take advantage of features.

• There was a WSDL update: additions, changes and new namespaces. The base namespace for workspace schemas is now http://www.globus.org/2008/06/workspace/

• Some bug fixes.

• Integration with context broker.

• New ensemble service report operation allows efficient queries about a large number of workspaces. Can retrieve status and error messages about entire ensemble at once.

• Fixed scheduler backout to correctly handle situation where ensemble wasn't launched yet but ensemble-destroy was invoked.

• Fixed bug where IP address updates were not passing through cache layer to DB correctly causing a possible inconsistency if container restarted in certain circumstances. NOTE: this bugfix was not present in TP1.3.3 but is present in TP1.3.3.1.

• Various internal changes (see CVS log)

• No configuration changes are necessary for moving to this version from TP1.3.2. But to enable the context broker, you need to configure paths to a credential for it in the jndi-config file and make sure the WSDD file lists the context broker as in the source file "deploy-server.wsdd" (which becomes server-config.wsdd)

• Added cloud-client cluster and contextualization support. Includes new "--cluster" flag (see cloud-client CHANGES.txt for full changes there).

  See the clouds page and the new clusters page.

• The regular commandline client has new flags for ensemble and context broker support. See "-h" output.

• Support for gzip via filename-sense. See cloud notes on image compression/decompression. This can save a lot of time in cluster launch situations since the gzip/gunzip happens on the VMMs simultaneously, cutting transfer times (where there is contention) considerably.

• Local-locked the control of dhcpd start and stop: now works for situations where multiple workspaces are deployed on a VMM simultaneously (such as one VM per core and launching as part of a cluster). The DHCP adjustment was being excercised simultaneously, revealing the race.

• There is no need to change the workspace-control configuration file from a TP1.3.2 compatible one. There is a new configuration if you want to use it, though. The "[behavior] --> num_cpu_per_vm" configuration allows you to peg the number of vcpus that are assigned to every workspace.

  You can choose to not upgrade workspace-control at all if you don't want the features listed here.

• No changes.