AZURE PoC in the Box

As part of the $3 billions invested in Europe, Microsoft is opening multiple datacenters to support fast growing cloud adoption of Azure. The partnership between Microsoft and Activeeon resulted in developing the “AZURE PoC in the BOX” program. The main objective is to support companies on their path to gain competitive advantage through cloud services, flexibility and open solutions and support their transition.

AZURE PoC in the BOX principles

The AZURE PoC in the BOX program aims to reduce transition to the Cloud by tackling adoption barriers. The challenges usually faced are on multiple levels:

• Management approval,
• Investment justification and money allocation,
• Environment configuration and time to market deployments,
• Workload transition.

Compute resources will be allocated on the fly for the AZURE PoC to replicate your environment. Thus, investment is greatly reduced and a replicated infrastructure is instantly available.

Activeeon is an open source Software Vendor, the solution aims to simulate the workload on the platform. Its flexibility lets any business (ie “métier”) users of the PoC to orchestrate application framework across environments (e.g. local and Azure) while controlling execution. Scenarios can then be tested in a timely manner thus giving instant feedback to the testing teams.

Moreover, Activeeon supports transition to the cloud in multiple ways. Activeeon’s engineers are Azure certified expert. A workflow conversion tool has been developed to quickly adapt hundreds of workflows to ProActive standards. Finally, Activeeon’s solution being agnostic to the resource, the transition to the cloud is seamless and progressive without IT process interruption and therefore end users disruption.

Leveraging those technologies, the AZURE PoC in the BOX also aims to present companies how to boost agility at a process and infrastructure levels and estimate real cost savings. Moreover, it will stimulate access to new services enabling new insights or free additional resources. For instance, access to high available databases, user friendly replication mechanisms, etc.

AZURE PoC in the BOX journey

In three simple steps, get setup and explore new opportunities.

Easily Try ProActive Integration with TORQUE

In addition to deploy and manage its own resources, ProActive can be used as a meta-scheduler and benefit from infrastructures that are already deployed and configured. ProActive can interface with several schedulers and resource managers, including TORQUE. In this post, we show how ProActive can manage native scheduler node sources, whose nodes belong to the TORQUE resource manager, and how ProActive can submit jobs to these resources. We provide the ‘activeeon/proactive-torque-integration’ Docker image that allows our users to try this particular integration easily in a Docker container. This Docker image includes an installation of TORQUE and an entrypoint that downloads and runs the latest release of ProActive.

Setup the Docker Container

First start the Docker container:

$ docker run -d -h docker -p 10022:22 -p 18080:8080 --privileged --name proactive-container activeeon/proactive-torque-integration

Before using ProActive, you need to monitor the Docker container until the ProActive scheduler is running (a few minutes are needed). You can do this with the following command:

$ docker logs proactive-container --follow

As long as it does not return anything, it means that the ProActive scheduler is not yet running.

When the SchedulerStarter java process is displayed, open a web browser and go to http://localhost:18080/. Wait a bit more if the page cannot be displayed, ProActive is still starting.

Create a Native Scheduler Node Source

Now we can create a native scheduler node source, that will eventually manage the nodes of TORQUE. In order to manage the resources of another scheduler than ProActive, and to have these resources represented as ProActive nodes, you need to create a node source with an infrastructure and policy that are dedicated to native schedulers.

Go to the ProActive Resource Manager and login with the admin/admin credential. Click on ‘Add Nodes’. Choose a name for your node source and fill the form with the following values (remove the quotes):