Tuesday 27 May 2014

Progress Report

Today I met with Javid to talk about what I will have to do in the following weeks.

The first thing I will have to do is the Progress Report for ELEC4718. It must contain:
  1. An introduction
  2. A literature survey, of 5-10 pages, in a form similar to that which will appear in the final treatise
  3. A report of not more than 1000 words on the work carried out thus far
  4. A revised proposal/plan for the following semester's work.

Javid has mentioned that for the literature survey, I should have to read 20-30 relevant research papers on the subject. 3-4 pages should be related to modelling and benchmarking, whilst 6-7 pages should be related to virtual machines + migration.

Each article should be reviewed in about 2-3 lines.
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The 2nd thing I will have to which is related to this thesis work is to do more research on modelling. So far I've found 8 papers, but only 2-3 of them seem related. The papers are on linear and non-linear models.
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The 3rd thing I have to do is fix up any more problems in my script, and to rethink some of the experiments I will have to perform. I forgot to account for the migrating virtual machine performing some load whilst migration occurs. (I had only considered the source and target host performing some load).
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The last thing I will have to do is to prepare a 10-minute presentation for Javid and another student on how I implemented my script. I will have to talk about how I implemented, what I used, things I achieved and any problems I had.

This presentation will be in 2 weeks time, and should be approximately 10 slides long. Javid will email me more details later.
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One these things are done, I will have perform the actual experiments and collect results. Javid has suggested that I use MatLab with the results to assist in finding a model that fits the data, and to perform any graphing. Collecting data is expected to take a very long time, as there will be MANY experiments to perform.

Thursday 15 May 2014

Virtual Machines on Server

2 days ago I gave Javid my virtual machines which I had built to do my experiments on.

He uploaded them onto the server, so now I can access them on VSphere. The virtual machines are setup in the following way:
  • There are 2 host machines, with at least 1 static VM on them.
  • There is another host machine that is stored on another host, to ensure that it is isolated from these other 2 host machines.
  • There is a 3rd VM that is an iSCSI drive, which allows it to be migrated between the 2 host machines.
  • Using my program, I should be creating load on the static VMs, and migrating the 3rd VM between the hosts.

For the next 2 weeks (until my next meeting), I should be doing the following:
  • Research on modelling.
  • Play around with VSphere, especially with the migration option, to get the hang of using it
  • Think about the experiments I will be performing.