Experimental Analysis of OpenStack Effect on Host Resources Utilization

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the frontier technologies, which over the last decade has gained a widespread commercial and educational user base. OpenStack is one of the popular open-source cloud management platforms for establishing a private or public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) cloud. Although OpenStack started with very few core modules, it now houses nearly 38 modules and is quite complex. Such a complex software bundle is bound to have an impact on the underlying hardware utilization of the host system. This paper analyzes the effect of OpenStack on the host machine’s hardware. For this purpose, an extensive empirical evaluation has been done on different types of hardware, different virtualization levels and with different flavors of operating systems comparing the CPU utilization, and memory consumption. OpenStack was deployed using Devstack on a single node. From the results it is evident that standalone machine with Ubuntu server operating system is the least affected by OpenStack and thereby has more available resources for computation of user workloads.