Virtual Appliances

Overview:

Virtual appliances are virtual machine images encapsulating pre-installed, pre-configured software that can be easily deployed on cloud resources. Users of FutureGrid can use public appliance images posted by other users, as well as contribute to the repository of images.

This page provides a summary of community-provided virtual appliances that are available for use on FutureGrid. If you have created a virtual appliance and you would like to advertise its availability and features with the community, feel free to edit this page and include information about your appliance.

Creating Your Own Appliance:

Any FutureGrid user with Eucalyptus or Nimbus accounts can create and register an appliance. The approach is similar in both cases: you can upload an existing image into FutureGrid (e.g. from another Eucalyptus or Nimbus cloud, or an image you create on your own computer), or you can customize an instance interactively in FutureGrid and save it in a FutureGrid resource.

Nimbus:

You can upload a "common" image so it becomes available to others in a FutureGrid cloud resource - to do this, add the flag --common to the cloud_client.sh command line when you transfer an image (ensure you are using cloud client version 020 or above).  You can also save a Nimbus instance that you are using interactively (through ssh) as an image. Please refer to the manual for cloud_client.sh and the  Nimbus tutorial for instructions.

Eucalyptus: 

Please refer to FutureGrid tutorial GA7.

Reusing an Existing Appliance:

There are several appliances already available on FutureGrid. The table below summarizes a list of appliances, where they are available, and their image names. If you have an appliance that you would like to add to this list, please add it to the table.

Editing tips for the table:

• You can add rows to the table by right-clicking the last row of the table and selecting Row->Insert Row After
• If you make a mistake (e.g., deleting a row), you can undo it by pressing CTRL-Z
• You need to click on the Submit button so your changes take effect
• You can create a community page explaining your appliance and its usage in more depth, and can link to it from this page

Appliance name	Appliance description	FutureGrid system(s) available	Appliance ID	Installed by (FutureGrid user ID)
Grid Appliance	Self-configures Condor/MPI/Hadoop virtual clusters for training/education	alamo, india	grid-appliance-2.05.03.gz (alamo), emi-E4ED1880 (india)	panoat
OpenStack Appliance	Deploys a single-node OpenStack compute virtual cloud	alamo	openstack-ubuntu-10.10-amd64.img	menghan
ViNe Appliance	Deploys the ViNe virtual network overlay to connect private-address VMs in sierra and foxtrot	sierra, foxtrot	centos-5.5-x64-vine.gz	menghan
Twister Appliance	Deploys a virtual private cluster running the Twister iterative MapReduce system	india	emi-F0B8194D	jemitche
(Add your appliance here)