The following three simulators for cloud computing are open-source software, and can be downloaded and installed free of charge.
(1) CloudSim
http://www.cloudbus.org/cloudsim/
The primary objective of this project is to provide a generalized, and extensible simulation framework that enables seamless modeling, simulation, and experimentation of emerging Cloud computing infrastructures and application services. By using CloudSim, researchers and industry-based developers can focus on specific system design issues that they want to investigate, without getting concerned about the low level details related to Cloud-based infrastructures and services.
Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Rajiv Ranjan, Anton Beloglazov, Cesar A. F. De Rose, and Rajkumar Buyya, "CloudSim: A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Environments and Evaluation of Resource Provisioning Algorithms," Software: Practice and Experience (SPE), Volume 41, Number 1, Wiley Press, New York, USA, January 2011, pp. 23-50.
(2) GreenCloud
http://greencloud.gforge.uni.lu/index.html
Greencloud is a sophisticated packet-level simulator for energy-aware cloud computing data centers with a focus on cloud communications. It offers a detailed fine-grained modeling of the energy consumed by the data center IT equipment, such as computing servers, network switches, and communication links.
D. Kliazovich, P. Bouvry, and S. U. Khan, "A Packet-level Simulator of Energy- aware Cloud Computing Data Centers," Journal of Supercomputing, vol. 62, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1263-1283.
(3) iCanCloud
http://www.arcos.inf.uc3m.es/~icancloud/Home.html
iCanCloud is a simulation platform aimed to model and simulate cloud computing systems, which is targeted to those users who deal closely with those kinds of systems. The main objective of iCanCloud is to predict the trade-offs between cost and performance of a given set of applications executed in a specific hardware, and then provide to users useful information about such costs.
Alberto Núñez, Jose L. Vázquez-Poletti, Agustin C. Caminero, Gabriel G. Castañé, Jesúus Carretero and Ignacio M. Llorente "iCanCloud: A Flexible and Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Simulator," Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 10, Number 1, 2012, pp.185-209.
There are many simulator that can be used for simulating cloud concepts. we can not say that particular simulator is best to use... it all depands upon your actual requirement.
Which is the best simulator for cloud computing? If I can help... Go to www.areslimited.com scientific personal website and click COMPUTER CLOUD to see the CLOURA (CLOUdRiskAssesor)You can observe it however it cannot be transferred only for educational use. This is V1.0 it is now at V2.1. V1.0 is only for public use. Please go to the CV of the author on the same welcome page and on p. 55/130 view the CLOUD COMPUTING paper of the Wiley Comp Stat Interdisciplinary Series(WIREs). I hope this is useful. Good luck. DrS.URL: www.aum.edu/csis
The previous lead was on the CLOUD Discrete Event Simulator (DES) not to do with protocols etc. It tells you what will happen to the relaibility of CLOUD delivering the desired service in a year or similar for say, 100,000 simulation runs if all the statistical inputs for the products' failure and repair history that forms the cloud (i.e. servers) versus the load or demand cycle (for 8760 hours in a year for example) are entered. It is all very meticulously explained in details in the WILEY open access paper as follows:
Sahinoglu M., Cueva-Parra L., “CLOUD Computing” Wiley Interdisciplinary Series 2012:
The following three simulators for cloud computing are open-source software, and can be downloaded and installed free of charge.
(1) CloudSim
http://www.cloudbus.org/cloudsim/
The primary objective of this project is to provide a generalized, and extensible simulation framework that enables seamless modeling, simulation, and experimentation of emerging Cloud computing infrastructures and application services. By using CloudSim, researchers and industry-based developers can focus on specific system design issues that they want to investigate, without getting concerned about the low level details related to Cloud-based infrastructures and services.
Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Rajiv Ranjan, Anton Beloglazov, Cesar A. F. De Rose, and Rajkumar Buyya, "CloudSim: A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Environments and Evaluation of Resource Provisioning Algorithms," Software: Practice and Experience (SPE), Volume 41, Number 1, Wiley Press, New York, USA, January 2011, pp. 23-50.
(2) GreenCloud
http://greencloud.gforge.uni.lu/index.html
Greencloud is a sophisticated packet-level simulator for energy-aware cloud computing data centers with a focus on cloud communications. It offers a detailed fine-grained modeling of the energy consumed by the data center IT equipment, such as computing servers, network switches, and communication links.
D. Kliazovich, P. Bouvry, and S. U. Khan, "A Packet-level Simulator of Energy- aware Cloud Computing Data Centers," Journal of Supercomputing, vol. 62, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1263-1283.
(3) iCanCloud
http://www.arcos.inf.uc3m.es/~icancloud/Home.html
iCanCloud is a simulation platform aimed to model and simulate cloud computing systems, which is targeted to those users who deal closely with those kinds of systems. The main objective of iCanCloud is to predict the trade-offs between cost and performance of a given set of applications executed in a specific hardware, and then provide to users useful information about such costs.
Alberto Núñez, Jose L. Vázquez-Poletti, Agustin C. Caminero, Gabriel G. Castañé, Jesúus Carretero and Ignacio M. Llorente "iCanCloud: A Flexible and Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Simulator," Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 10, Number 1, 2012, pp.185-209.
Please see also the book chapter (about to be uploaded Oct 16, 2013 after 20:30 CST-USA) on Cloud Computing which elaboreates on CLOURA and other(s) such as Kim's. Thanks for your interest.
Sahinoglu M., CLOUD Computing Risk Assessment and Management, Book (Risk Assessment and Management) Chapter, Academy Publish, pp. 412-445, November 2012.
CLOUD Computing Risk Assessment and Management, Book (Risk Assessment and Management) Chapter, Academy Publish, pp. 412-445, November 2012. http://www.academypublish.org/book/show/title/risk-assessment-and-management
The CloudLightning Simulator has been released as Open Source. The research done by CERTH suggest it outperforms CloudSim for scale of Nodes/VMs and tasks. It also supports simulation for traditional cloud and self-organising cloud.
Selecting a cloud simulator totally depends upon your project/research requirements.
Cloud Sim requires one to be a efficient java programmer in order to work with it and for GUI one could use Java Swing at front End and that also requires some hard coding.
Cloud Analyst would be good in cases requiring efficiency and cost checking with easy to develop front end with embedded Java Swing support.
For network level operations or research one could use Green Cloud simulator.
Like all these others are their satisfying different other requirements.
If you are looking for a general purpose cloud simulation framework, take a look at CloudSim Plus, a totally re-engineered independent fork of CloudSim.
It's a modern and actively maintained Java 8 framework that is way easier to use and has lots of exclusive features, such as: VM vertical and horizontal scaling, Host fault injection, joint power- and network-aware simulations and much more.
CloudSim hasn't received updates since May 2016 and there is a lot of open issues.
CloudSim Plus currently has around 30 exclusive long-waited features and lots of bug fixes. Check out the official website at http://cloudsimplus.org
And please don't forget to give us a star at GitHub to help promote the project and keep it going.
CloudSim and CloudAnalyst. Currently using CloudAnalyst. You can have a look at this site that compares the simulators. https://opensourceforu.com/2016/11/best-open-source-cloud-computing-simulators/