Exploration and Practices of Edge Computing: Cloud Managing Virtualized Devices
Written by Gavin Lu, LF Edge member, EdgeX Foundry China Project Lead and R&D Director in the VMware Office of the CTO
As an industry leader with vast experience and knowledge, Gavin has been writing a series of articles focused on edge computing. These articles are posted on his personal blog and are posted here with his permission. To read more content from Gavin, visit his website.
Introduction to the Architecture of Pallas
The previous article introduced how to build and install virtualized devices, but did not touch how to manage large-scale virtualized devices from the cloud. This article introduces the architecture of Pallas to achieve the above goal.
Pallas is the second milestone of the project Asteroid after Ceres. In this release, the basic problems of cloud managing virtualized devices are solved:
- The device-cloud connection is narrow and unstable
- Large scale of devices
- Serious security concerns, often forbidding any open ports
The main functions of the Pallas architecture are implemented by the device manager and the agent virtual machine. Its design key points are:
- Adopt MQTT protocol suitable for narrow-band, unstable network connections
- The device manager in the cloud adopts the design concept of typical Internet architecture, with multiple layers, micro-services, multiple buffers, and read-write separation
- The device is automatically registered to the device manager, and the device initiates all connections and response happens in the cloud
- Close all ports on the device, run without VPN / SD-WAN, cross public networks
- Each device has a randomly created, globally unique and permanent ID
Installation requirements
- vSphere Hypervisor is installed on the device.
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- Device agent
- CPU: 1 x86-64 vCore
- Memory: 512MB
- Storage: 5GB
- Device agent
- Device manager
- CPU: 2 vCores
- Memory: 8GB
- Storage: 100GB
- Network: Open ports 443 and 1883, the device is visible
Note: In order for the agent to work properly, the device requires at least vSphere Essentials Kit license, or apply for the Enterprise Edition 60-day trial using the method described in the previous article.
Download and Installation
Download Pallas
Note: The download package provided on the Flings website is a technical preview, which does not include commercial support. It is recommended that you carefully read its installation and user guide before initialize the installation.
Install device manager
The way to install device manager is the same as the typical way to install an OVA of virtual machines, which can be completed in sequence by referring to the steps in the Pallas installation guide.
Note: Although device manager is packaged in OVA mode, it does not depend on any specific virtualization infrastructure or cloud platform. In an alternative, it can be converted from OVA to other formats, or install on any cloud platform that supports OVA format.
Install device agent
In order to simplify the process of installing device agent, it is recommended to use the virtual machine OVA instead of the binary package.
ovftool –acceptAllEulas –name=pallas_agent –datastore=DATASTORENAME -dm=thin –X:injectOvfEnv –powerOn pallas_agent_ubuntu.ova ‘vi://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ESXIHOST’
Configuration and Use
Configuration
If the device is connected to the cloud via WiFi or a telco carreir mobile network, the corresponding PCIe or USB NIC needs to be passed through to the device agent virtual machine. In this way, the device agent virtual machine can be registered to the device manager.
Use
After the device is registered to the device manager, you can perform CRUD-like operations on users, devices, and virtual machines like other ordinary management tools.
It should be noted that because the communication protocol of metadata between the device manager and the device is based on MQTT, the status updates of the device and the virtual machine on top of it are completed asynchronously. If you don’t find a task completed in “real time”, you may need to wait for a while or refresh the status.
For tasks such as deploying a virtual machine or patching a device, large files are downloaded via HTTPS and auto resuming.
To complete all functions above, there is no need for mutual IP visibility between the manager and the device, nor the installation of any VPN or SD-WAN. The device can also be safely behind a firewall, NAT, or gateway.
Next
The previous two articles described how to build and install virtualized devices, and how to manage virtualized devices from the cloud.
In fact, the use of containerized equipment is very common, and it often implies local orchestration, cloud operation and maintenance.
- Local orchestration means that single-point failures of devices cannot be handled well. Even the most common deployment approach of EdgeX Foundry is to deploy core container instances of microservices on one single device.
- Cloud operation and maintenance means managing containerized devices from the cloud. Most manufacturers have their own specialized solutions, which brings another problem of technology fragmentation.
The solutions to these two problems will be discussed in subsequent chapters. The next article will introduce a cloud managing containerized device solution to solve the problem of fragmentation.
