VEP 2.1 is now available

VEP offers two types of services:

1. management of data centres for a Cloud administrator allowing greater control on the physical resources;

2. management of end-user distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines on a Cloud with an interface facilitating the deployment and application life-cycle management.

The VEP team has issued VEP v2.1 , a new version replacing the old one (v2.0) adding new features and fixing the known bugs.

The supported features are:

• OpenNebula: VEP allows to manage a OpenNebula Cloud System offering a completely transparent interface
• Open Standard support: VEP respects the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) OVF and CIMI standards
• Data centre representation: VEP stores the provider datacenter layout to enforce some SLA requirements
• Physical resource allocation and resource provisioning for end user's applications
• Easy interfaces: easy browser based Cloud administrator and end-user application management interfaces
• VM Scheduling: the new VEP scheduler is independent from the IaaS Scheduler to allow placement constraints on the resources
• Advance Reservation: VEP allows to reserves a number of VMs from a start date to an end date to guarantee the deployment, in addition to run an application in best effort mode
• Web User Interface: VEP provides an easy web interface where the user can improve his experience using the tool
• Remote Storage: VEP allows to create remote storage using GAFS or to mount an already existing storage
• OAuth Support: VEP includes an OAuth client to retrieve delegated certificate to use inside the created VMs

VEP aims at offering the full management of IaaS Cloud while shielding the administrators the complexity of managing heterogeneous resources. VEP is designed to provide interoperability by offering a uniform way of representing and managing the resources of a Cloud provider. VEP could also easily enable the participation of a Cloud provider to a federation seamlessly and it does proper VM contextualization and application lifecycle management. Additionally it publishes application events and metrics for application's monitoring and SLA enforcement.

VEP enables interoperability through its RESTful interface based on the DMTF's Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) standard. The CIMI model defines a framework for the application life cycle management on a Cloud provider infrastructure, with applications generated from an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) document. VEP extends the CIMI API to support the deployment of applications under SLA terms.

VEP RESTful interface allows Cloud administrators to manage and control numerous aspect of the service offering. For VM scheduling to work properly, the data centre topology information is desired in VEP. The software has a simple and intuitive interface to allow administrators input topology information about their data centre. This interface also permits the administrator to selectively permit hosts to be managed via the VEP software. VEP never schedules a VM on a host not permitted for use by the administrator.

An Installation Guide and a User Guide is available at the VEP project site.

The VEP team is working hard to make VEP an even better system; the Openstack support is around the corner. So stay tuned for the the next releases.