2 What is Haizea?

Haizea is an open-source VM-based lease management architecture. Let's break that down, shall we?

Haizea is a resource manager

(or, depending on who you ask, a "resource scheduler"): Haizea is a software component that can manage a set of computers (typically a cluster), allowing users to request exclusive use of those resources described in a variety of terms, such as "I need 10 nodes, each with 1 GB of memory, right now" or "I need 4 nodes, each with 2 CPUs and 2GB of memory, from 2pm to 4pm tomorrow".

Haizea uses leases

The fundamental resource provisioning abstraction in Haizea is the lease. Intuitively, a lease is some form of contract where one party agrees to provide a set of resources (an apartment, a car, etc.) to another party. When a user wants to request computational resources from Haizea, it does so in the form of a lease. When applied to computational resources, the lease abstraction is a powerful and general construct with a lot of nuances. Leases are described in more detail in Chapter 2

Haizea is VM-based

We hold that the best way of implementing resource leases is using virtual machines (VMs). Therefore, Haizea's scheduling algorithms are geared towards managing virtual machines, factoring in all the extra operations (and overhead) involved in managing VMs. The Globus Virtual Workspaces group, where Haizea was originally developed, has an extensive list of publications that argue how using virtual machines for resource leasing is A Good Thing (and also Not A Trivial Thing).

Haizea is open source

Haizea is published under the Apache License 2.0, a BSD-like OSI-compatible license.