The first stable version of the Haizea Lease Manager was released a few days ago and is available for download at http://haizea.cs.uchicago.edu/

Haizea can be used as a drop-in replacement for OpenNebula’s scheduling daemon, providing OpenNebula with more advanced scheduling capabilities such as advance reservations and queueing of requests when there are no resources available.

Haizea 1.0 is compatible with the recently released OpenNebula 1.4 and, compared to the last major release of Haizea (Technology Preview 1.3 in February 2009), introduces many new features focused on:

• Extensibility: A new modular scheduler design that makes it easier to choose between different scheduling policies, or to write custom policies that can be “plugged into” Haizea. Writing a custom policy only requires writing a Python module implementing a set of methods described in the Haizea documentation.
• Stability: Many internal changes, including a larger number of unit tests, that make Haizea more stable.
• Documentation: More documentation, including developer documentation for users interested in extending Haizea or writing custom scheduling algorithms or policies.

For a list of all the new features, take a look at the Haizea Changelog

Work on Haizea 1.2 is already under way, and will include the following features:

• Support for leases with deadlines. Haizea will include deadline-driven scheduling algorithms such that, if a user specifies a deadline for a lease, Haizea will only accept if it can be scheduled before that deadline. Furthermore, preemptions (if allowed by the lease) will only be done if the deadline restriction is still met.
• Lease negotiation. The lease lifecycle will be expanded to incorporate a negotiation phase before a lease is accepted. In this negotiation, it will be possible for Haizea to reply to a lease request with multiple possible leases which the user can accept or reject. The initial focus in this work will be on supporting lease pricing.
• Lease pricing. Haizea will be able to price leases, based on pluggable pricing leases.

Since most of the work for 1.2 is driven by research efforts, the focus for the next couple of months is going to be mostly on the simulation side of Haizea. Nonetheless, improving the integration between Haizea and OpenNebula, particularly in regards to making Haizea more aware of unscheduled changes in the VMs (an issue that several users have brought to our attention), is still part of our long-term goals. However, we don’t anticipate we”ll be able to work on improving that part of Haizea until, at least, the summer. Nonetheless, if there are developers who would be interested in helping to improve the Haizea/OpenNebula integration (specially those who have a stake in this integration), please don’t hesitate to let us know, as we’d be happy to provide assistance.