[Haizea] Q: Haizea vs. mm_sched

[Borja Sotomayor]

Hi,

> Are there any comparison between Haizea and latest OpenNebula's
> mm_sched  exists?

There are no comparisons on the web, but the main differences are the following:

- mm_sched supports immediate scheduling of VMs and, to a certain
degree, best-effort scheduling (requests that can't be satisfied right
away will be kept in a pending state until resources become available,
but mm_sched makes no attempt to optimize the queue). Haizea supports
best-effort scheduling (with backfilling), advance reservations, and
immediate scheduling. We are currently working on adding support for
deadline-sensitive scheduling.

- mm_sched supports a rank scheduling policy
(http://www.opennebula.org/doku.php?id=documentation:rel1.4:schg).
Haizea doesn't support rank scheduling, but it does support pluggable
scheduling policies (i.e., you can write your own policies easily; a
rank scheduling policy wouldn't be hard to implement in Haizea, but
it's not on our roadmap). A few basic policies (including a greedy
policy) are included with Haizea.

- Besides the pluggable policies, Haizea provides a scheduling
framework that allows you to extend Haizea with new scheduling
algorithms (it also includes a lot of knobs and parameters you can
tweak). It also includes a simulator (independent of OpenNebula) that
you can use to observe the effects of a scheduling algorithm over days
or months (it also allows you to easily run multiple scheduling
profiles and compare the results of each). mm_sched is not
particularly easy to extend, and does not include a simulator.

- mm_sched has been thoroughly tested with OpenNebula, and is probably
your best bet if all you need is immediate scheduling (of the sort you
can find in public clouds like Amazon EC2). Haizea has been well
tested with OpenNebula, but some features haven't been integrated with
OpenNebula yet (like scheduling of VM image deployments). Furthermore,
as noted previously on this mailing list, Haizea is still not too good
about reacting to unscheduled changes in OpenNebula-managed VMs (see
https://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/haizea/2009-November/000084.html)

Summing up, mm_sched is much better integrated with OpenNebula (it is,
after all, developed by the OpenNebula team) but has less features.
Haizea is a much more powerful and extensible scheduler, but the
integration with OpenNebula still needs some work

Cheers!
--Borja.