7 Other things you can do with Haizea

At this point, we have seen how to run simple simulations with Haizea. However, there is a lot more that Haizea can do:

Run on real hardware

First and foremost, almost everything you just saw above in simulation can be done on real hardware. This is accomplished by using Haizea with the OpenNebula virtual infrastructure manager. So, if you have a Xen or KVM cluster, you can just install OpenNebula and Haizea to enable your users to request VM-based leases on your cluster. This is explained in Chapter 6.

Run complex simulations

This chapter concerned itself mostly with scheduling two leases on a 4-node cluster during a span of roughly 2 hours. Boring. Haizea can handle more complex simulations, and also provides the necessary tools for you to easily run multiple simulations with different profiles. For example, in the Haizea paper ``Combining Batch Execution and Leasing Using Virtual Machines'' (see the Haizea publication page: http://haizea.cs.uchicago.edu/pubs.html) we simulated running 72 30-day workloads in six different configurations, or 36 years of lease scheduling. Running multiple simulations is explained in Section 5.5

Produce reports and graphs

The above examples relied on reading the Haizea log messages or peeking into Haizea's schedule using command-line tools. This is ok for a simple simulation, but no fun when you're scheduling thousands of leases. Haizea saves a fair amount of raw data to disk with scheduling metrics, utilization information, etc. which can be used to generate reports and graphs. We are in the process of producing tools that will allow you to easily analyse that data and create graphs, although some pointers on how to interpret the raw data produced by Haizea are presented in Chapter 7.