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.
Now that data center are software driven, it is crucial to have a single source of truth, a kind of know all inventory about your resources, your nodes, their functions and their associated parameters, which describe everything and store it in a single location. Welcome reclass which use Class inheritance to define nodes roles and avoid duplication by gathering all important datacenter parameters in a central location. All of this will then be used by your automation tools like Salt, Ansible or Puppet to bootstrap your infrastructure as a software. In other words, reclass can be classified as a hierarchical inventory management solution. Let see how we could use it with Salt.
Always reinventing the wheel doesn’t pay off most of the time, so telling Salt what to do by creating Salt States again and again to install application components isn’t really efficient. Instead Salt Formulas brings convention and a bit of magic, and offer reusable bundles which package altogether all the necessary piece to automate a specific task, like deploying etcd, a distributed key value store cluster, which we will take as an example in this article.
The amazing world of configuration management software is really well populated these days. You may already have looked at Puppet, Chef or Ansible but that’s not all of it, today we focus on SaltStack. Simplicity is at its core without any compromise on speed or scalability. Some users have up to 10.000 minions or more. Salt remote execution is built on top of an event bus which makes Salt unique.