Running VMPlaceS in a Docker container

This guide will cover the following points:

• Installation of Docker
• Creating a VMPlaceS image
• Running a simulation

I- Installation of Docker

Download Docker community edition at the following URL:

• Docker Community edition (Linux, MacOS, Windows)

II- Installation of VMPlaceS

First, clone the git repository of VMPlaceS:

git clone https://github.com/BeyondTheClouds/VMPlaceS.git

Then, browse in the VMPlaceS folder and run the following command in order to build an image that will be used for containers that will host VMPlaceS simulations:

docker build -t vmplaces .

It should take 5 to 10 minutes to prepare the docker image.

To validate the image creation process, check that the following command

docker images

produces an output similar to this:

REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE vmplaces latest 31c12e5cb918 About an hour ago 1.36GB

III- Running a simulation

Instantiate a container based on the previously created image:

docker run -it --rm vmplaces bash

and run VMPlaceS:

java -Xmx4G -d64 -cp target/simulation.jar simulation.SimpleMain --algo=example --duration 1800 --nb_hosts=10 --nb_vms=93 --load_mean=60.0

IV- Tips

Setup a shared folder between the host and the containers

It is possible to use a shared folder between docker containers and the physcial host. It may help to extract from containers the events.json file. To do, do the following:

docker run -v /Users/jonathan/Documents/workspace/VMPlaceS/events:/VMPlaceS/events -it vmplaces bash

Docker will create a volume, mount it on the physical node. Each modification made by the container or the host, will be visible by the other computer. Thus to enable the host to access events.json files, just copy it from the container to the mounted volume.

Rebuild the VMPlaceS image (to take into code changes)

Add the --no-cache to the docker build command, as in the following command:

docker build --no-cache -t vmplaces .