As we’ve already seen in our previous articles Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) is really flexible and can tackle lots of different use cases. Last time we’ve looked at using Ceph as the OpenStack storage backend. Today we are reviewing different ways to leverage Neutron Open vSwitch ML2 plugin instead of the standard OpenContrail SDN solution to offer networking as a service to our users.
In the last few articles, I’ve detailed the workflow to deploy Mirantis Cloud Platform (aka MK now MCP) based on Mirantis OpenStack and a Reclass Model Driven Architecture (MDA). But you may want to use a different backend for storage then our standard MCP one, the reference Cinder LVM ISCSI Driver. In this MCP cookbook article, I’ll guide you step by step, to use Ceph as your storage backend for Glance (Images), Cinder (Volumes) and Nova (Guest Disks). You can use any of these options alone or combined.
In this article we assume that you are familiar with Salt, formulas, reclass and OpenStack-Salt. This is my cheatsheet which drives you step by step to deploy OpenStack Mitaka based on the latest model, using a new Cluster Class. If you feel lost, feel free to get back to the beginning.
After having reviewed Salt, Salt Formulas and reclass, it’s now time to put everything together to deploy OpenStack from openstack-salt project which use an elegant Model-Driven Architecture stored in a git repository which can be used for the life cycle management, auditing and documenting your infrastructure.
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.
For years a big gap existed between embedded OS for smartphone and server operating system. Mark Shuttleworth and his team have been working for quite some time on optimizing their Ubuntu operating system for the smartphone world. Beginning of december, they’ve announced a new transactionnally updated version of Ubuntu optimized for the cloud, the result of their years of working for the embedded world. Snappy is a minimal server image where applications can be upgraded and rolled back atomically. It’s not the only similar initiative, it started with CoreOS, a reachitected Linux OS to run modern infrastructure stacks, but RedHat is also trying to keep up with project Atomic. Snappy can be used to run Docker containers but not only, it’s one of the main differentiator of Canonical solution.
Unfortunately Canonical doesn’t offer a VMDK version of their Snappy technology, which we need to deploy it on our OpenStack vSphere environment. This article we’ll show you how to proceed then.
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.
Redhat announced a month ago OpenStack Platform 5.0 which officially support VMware NSX 6.0 and vSphere 5.5. In our lab today, we’ll deploy this OpenStack distribution and connect it to NSX and vSphere to see how easy it is and if everything works as expected. By the way it’s not, so beware, this article is just a preview of what’s coming. If you want to reproduce the same setup, you’ll have to wait until VMware officially support RedHat 7.0. This article will be updated accordingly when it will be publicly available.
Last year I published an article that detailled a deployment of OpenStack Grizzly using Rackspace private cloud solution, let’s update it to the latest 4.2.1 version. You can stick on v4.1.3 if you want to stick on Grizzly instead of OpenStack Havana.
Matt Ray is the community manager of a project at Chef (formerly Opscode) to unify all efforts around building up Chef Cookbooks for OpenStack deployment. For quite some time lots of people were forking the repository from Rackspace, it created a lot of fragmentation, so Matt is now gathering all around the StackForge repository where everyone can contribute. AT&T, Dell, Dreamhost, Gap, HP, HubSpot, IBM, Korea Telecom, Rackspace, SUSE amongst others are already contributing to this project. In this article we will detail how you can use them to deploy OpenStack on your environment.
Crowbar, a great cloud unboxer, is currently evolving at a rapid pace, if you want to see the latest and greatest thing without waiting any longer, you can build your own Crowbar ISO. In this article we’ll show you how to do just that using the Roxy branch which is supposed to support OpenStack Havanna. We will suppose you aren’t planning to contribute to the code, so we won’t use our any personalized Git repository. If you don’t know what’s Crowbar, it’s platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. But if you want to see how it could be used to deploy OpenStack, read our previous article.
OpenStack ecosystem grows at a rapid pace, deploying a private cloud starts by choosing the ideal tools for the job. Today we’ll look at what Rackspace have to offer in that space, their Open source Rackspace Private Cloud package enables quick deployment of an OpenStack cloud.
Fourth OpenStack meetup in Paris with a fully booked amphitheater at Epita, amazing growth of the french community. As a reminder, the first meetup happened June 10, 2013 with only 18 participants.
Crowbar is a cloud unboxer that use Chef, meaning it can deploy an OpenStack or Hadoop environment in a breeze. In this article we will use the first release candidate, codename pebbles (build 3476) for OpenStack Grizzly to deploy a demo lab running on VMware Fusion.
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.
Nicira and OpsCode partnered to build an OpenStack cloud at VMware. In this webinar we’ll have the opportunity to get some insight about it. It allows their team to build location independant labs in 50 seconds, provisionned from a self service portal. Principal driver: cost, agility and speed.
Greg Elkinbard built on demand IaaS and PaaS layer at Mirantis customer, he has 20 years of experience and is Senior Technical Director at Mirantis. Today he is comparing storage technologies in the context of delivering a storage as a service offering. He was assisted by David Fishman in charge of Marketing at Mirantis. Let’s dive-in.
Julien Niedergang, is a pre-sales SUSE engineer, curious about OpenStack, he presented SUSE strategy and solutions based on Crowbar, Chef and OpenStack.
HP recently launched their public cloud computing services based on OpenStack. In this article we will details some tips & tricks to efficiently use their services with Opscode Chef.
Cheatsheet created from Cybera blog.
Notes following up a webinar with Matt Ray from Opscode and Carl Perry, Cloud Architect at Dreamhost.