2013-April Tashi Incubator Status Report

Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.

The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud 
computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). 
The idea is to build a cluster management system that enables the Big 
Data that are stored in a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, 
manipulated, and computed on by remote users in a convenient, efficient, 
and safe manner.

Tashi originally encompassed just the tools to manage virtual machines 
using Xen and QEMU, but has been merged with Zoni, which manages the 
physical aspects of a cluster like power control, network settings and 
handing out physical machines.

Activities from January to April:

Added the ballon virtio to qemu options so tashi can dynamically change the
amount of memory allocated to a vm.  Found a small issue with how tashi
destroys vm's in qemu.  If we kill the process, the network cleanup scripts do
not run.  This caused issues while experimenting with openvswitch.  This was
changed be a little nicer so qemu has the ability to clean the network up.
Additions to the administrative database management included the ability to
pull the information from a local file on the system.  Even with caching, there
were problems with very slow requests to the admin database. Initial version of
disk management was added so that disk images can be cloned, copied, and
rebased.

The project has a user community, but it is small. Growth mostly has happened
by word of mouth. To show potential users at large the utility of this project,
the author of this report is creating a video showing the process of
installation, ease of setup, adminstration, and the ability to quickly get a
cloud up and running.  Hopefully this will increase visibility of the project.

Items to be resolved before graduation:
	* Generate more publicity for the project.
	* Develop members of the user community to submit feature
	  extensions.