Software Defined Networking (SDN) is often qualified as immature and tagged as complicated. Amongst the many solution available on the market, some of them can do a tremendous job of decoupling physical networking from logical networks used by cloud consumers. It then empower end users to deploy whatever architecture they need on their own. So deploying OpenStack without making sure to tackle the networking requirements of your team could be a recipe for failure.
In this article we’ll show you one way to address such a SDN requirement by showing you, step by step, the way to deploy Juniper Contrail 3.0 on top of Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 (Kilo).
In the Enterprise world, user authenticates over an Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) most of the time. Openstack Keystone, the identity service, integrates natively with LDAP directories for authentication and authorization services. The configuration of Keystone can be automated using Mirantis LDAP Fuel Plugin.
This article is a step by step guide to integrate Keystone to OpenLDAP but any other LDAP directory including Active Directory could do a perfect job too.
In large datacenters it’s common for each rack to live in its own broadcast domain. Fuel allows to deploy nodes on different networks by leveraging its Node Groups functionnality. In this article we’ll details the required steps to make this possible using Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 and we’ll also review Node Groups support improvements coming in MOS 8.0.
Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 got released few days ago and brings OpenStack Kilo and lots of innovation. I’m happy to share with you today a really nice feature, Reduced Footprint offers a way to deploy OpenStack on a small footprint as its name implies, two servers would be a good start. But three servers are still the bare minimum to achieve control plane HA.
Fuel will start by deploying a KVM node and then instantiate VMs to deploy OpenStack Controller within it. Fuel can also move itself to the same KVM hypervisor to free up one more physical node. In the end you’ll have a controller and fuel running on one machine, and the other bare metal server will be used as a compute node. That’s exactly the objective of this article so lets get started.
Imagine if you could easily get a virtual load balanced IP address for your fleet of web servers hosted on OpenStack as soon as you need it without having to wait for the networking team who’s managing the hardware load balancer to handle your request ?
That’s exactly what OpenStack Neutron is offering with its Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS) technnology which first appeared as an experimental feature in the Grizzly release. It’s built on the same model as the Network as a Service solution, an OpenStack operator can choose whatever load balancing technology which provides an OpenStack Neutron driver. Major load Balancing players like F5 or Citrix offers or will offer LBaaS Neutron drivers. I don’t have such devices in my backyard, so I’ll use the Open Source reference implementation instead (HAproxyNSDriver), based on HAProxy and supported by a french company headquartered in Jouy-en-Josas by the way ! To make things even simpler, I’ll also leverage the Mirantis OpenStack Fuel Plugin for LBaaS which makes installing and configuring LBaaS a breeze.
Since my last article about Fuel last June 2013, Mirantis have made great progress. It’s now a good time to review the current status of the recently released Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Tech Preview which comes with many new features like complete integration with vCenter and NSX. They’ve also released on Dec 18, 2014 a reference architecture for a deployment integrating with VMware vCenter and NSX.
If you tried to deploy OpenStack by yourself there a huge probability it failed and you may have given up after multiple unsuccessful tries. Some Linux distribution like Redhat or Suse are packaging everything for you to make things easy but today we’ll look at another alternative from Mirantis a company that just got a new round of financing from Redhat, SAP Ventures and Ericsson. This company offers an easy way to build up an OpenStack cloud environment, Fuel 3.0.