Private Cloud Distribution?

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Lewis Marshall

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Apr 14, 2013, 11:25:40 AM4/14/13
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Is anyone running Openstack internally?

Sorry for the long pre-amble...

I am looking at running an internal private cloud so DevOps and test environments can re-use one hardware pool across multiple different service lines. As a side effect of temporary tenancy, we'll try help enforce DevOps config management to build hosts from a few standard basic images + Puppet (as we already have some initial traction here).

Our primary guest OS will be SUSE SLES SP1 and SP2. Our environments range from single dev boxes to ideally staging 100+ guests to run together with suitable networking (subnet, firewall, cluster-ware, VIPs and load balancers) to faithfully replicate a production application service.

Aside from several Dev VM's for isolated Puppet Development and testing, all our current application environments are physical.

Can anyone give any advice about which distribution would be best to start with: Rackspace private cloud, Ubuntu, etc etc? Free is an obvious benefit at this stage. Ideally we would want to drive the cloud API from our own scripts and host CM data.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Lewis



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Brad Knowles

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Apr 14, 2013, 11:42:04 AM4/14/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com, Brad Knowles
On Apr 14, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Lewis Marshall <le...@technoplusit.co.uk> wrote:

> Is anyone running Openstack internally?

The company I work for has a subsidiary that is a developer of software that sits on top of OpenStack, and I've helped them get Folsom up and running on their own hardware, and I've tried to do the same with Grizzly. Nothing yet 100% successful, but I'm getting close.

> Our primary guest OS will be SUSE SLES SP1 and SP2. Our environments range from single dev boxes to ideally staging 100+ guests to run together with suitable networking (subnet, firewall, cluster-ware, VIPs and load balancers) to faithfully replicate a production application service.

From what I've seen, the SuSE guys have some pretty cool tools for working with OpenStack. We got a really nice demo on a recent OpenStack Austin Meetup that I attended.

> Aside from several Dev VM's for isolated Puppet Development and testing, all our current application environments are physical.
>
> Can anyone give any advice about which distribution would be best to start with: Rackspace private cloud, Ubuntu, etc etc? Free is an obvious benefit at this stage. Ideally we would want to drive the cloud API from our own scripts and host CM data.

OpenStack should build on top of a variety of different distributions and hypervisors, but Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with KVM is generally considered to be the best-tested combination. I'm sure the SuSE guys would be glad to help you find a suitable alternative that works well with their distribution.

But otherwise, I definitely think that you're headed in the right direction -- virtualize as much of your development platform as feasible, so that you can fail quickly but you can also recover quickly.

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Brad Knowles

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Apr 14, 2013, 3:22:20 PM4/14/13
to Lewis Marshall, Brad Knowles, devops-t...@googlegroups.com
On Apr 14, 2013, at 1:09 PM, Lewis Marshall <le...@technoplusit.co.uk> wrote:

> So any reason not to go with pre-integrated Ubuntu 12.04 with KVM as supplied with Rackspace Open Cloud V3? From a quick read it seems it doesn't support Nova.

I don't have any experience with that particular solution, so I can't make any statements one way or the other.

> Or put another way, has anyone got a complete Openstack Folsom release working with Nova and SUSE guests from just the Ubuntu Guide or with a Puppet / Chef for Openstack auto config?

Last I heard from Matt Ray, his Chef cookbooks for OpenStack still needed a little tweaking to get to work correctly for Folsom, and I don't know if they've been officially released yet. I don't know what the state of the state is for Puppet manifests in this space.

And I don't know how either relate to using SuSE vs. Ubuntu or any other distribution.

> I guess a concern is price and time - I can get some initial hardware but I need to show results without spending time integrating Openstack especially if it's been done before...

A lot of this stuff has been in flux lately, because so much work has been done on Grizzly. However, I believe a lot of things have recently come out, or at least a lot of work has recently been published.

For specifics, I would recommend getting on the OpenStack mailing lists and hitting their archives, to see what looks to you like it will be the best starting point.

James Turnbull

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Apr 14, 2013, 3:26:57 PM4/14/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com, Lewis Marshall, Brad Knowles
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Brad Knowles wrote:
> Last I heard from Matt Ray, his Chef cookbooks for OpenStack still
> needed a little tweaking to get to work correctly for Folsom, and I
> don't know if they've been officially released yet. I don't know
> what the state of the state is for Puppet manifests in this space.
>

The Puppet modules are in pretty solid shape. They just moved into the
OpenStack project's launchpad, Gerrit, Smokestack etc.

https://launchpad.net/puppet-openstack

Regards

James

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Manuel Pais

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Apr 15, 2013, 7:41:51 AM4/15/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com, le...@technoplusit.co.uk

I'm really interested in this discussion because we are at a nearly identical point as Lewis.

We've decided to try using Apache's Cloudstack (with Ubuntu/KVM) as this seemed the solution with least learning curve (we only have 1 part-time IT person and we only manage dev and QA environments).

Any advice for/against this setup is welcome :)

I'll post our findings here once we progress further.

Manuel

Allan Feid

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Apr 15, 2013, 8:22:27 AM4/15/13
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I'm currently running OpenStack Folsom internally on CentOS 6.3 with KVM. I can say getting Quantum up and running (the network portion) was a bit challenging since Open vSwitch does not run well on the EL 6.3 kernel. After upgrading to a 3.7.x kernel provided by ELRepo, and packaging Open vSwitch, everything went pretty smoothly. I also wound up rolling my own puppet modules since I don't believe there was a working module for CentOS when Essex came out. There have been a fair amount of improvements in Grizzly, for one better LDAP integration in Keystone, which I'm planning to roll out here over the next couple months. If you're starting brand new, go for Grizzly, if your distribution doesn't have packages ready for Grizzly, try to help out and get the packages built, otherwise Ubuntu/Fedora are your best bets.


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Karanbir Singh

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Apr 15, 2013, 8:09:38 PM4/15/13
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Hi,

On 04/15/2013 01:22 PM, Allan Feid wrote:
> I'm currently running OpenStack Folsom internally on CentOS 6.3 with KVM. I
> can say getting Quantum up and running (the network portion) was a bit
> challenging since Open vSwitch does not run well on the EL 6.3 kernel.

This should be a lot easier now, 6.4's distro kernel has native ovs support.

> roll out here over the next couple months. If you're starting brand new, go
> for Grizzly, if your distribution doesn't have packages ready for Grizzly,
> try to help out and get the packages built, otherwise Ubuntu/Fedora are
> your best bets.

this just got announced earlier today, http://openstack.redhat.com -
I've run through the Quickstart page a short while back and essentially,
JustWorks on a CentOS-6-x86_64-minimal install. From zero to running in
~ 14 minutes on a Dell r420; but it is an extremely brief route to
OpenStack - most people will want to play with the components to get a
better idea of the layers, so they know where to poke first when stuff
breaks :D

Regards,

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Lewis Marshall

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Apr 14, 2013, 3:09:58 PM4/14/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com, Brad Knowles
Cheers Brad.

So any reason not to go with pre-integrated Ubuntu 12.04 with KVM as supplied with Rackspace Open Cloud V3? From a quick read it seems it doesn't support Nova.

Or put another way, has anyone got a complete Openstack Folsom release working with Nova and SUSE guests from just the Ubuntu Guide or with a Puppet / Chef for Openstack auto config?

I guess a concern is price and time - I can get some initial hardware but I need to show results without spending time integrating Openstack especially if it's been done before... 

Thanks again for any input in advance.

Lewis
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Lewis Marshall

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:16:39 PM4/17/13
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Thanks for the feedback.

i've been told paid for support is now a requirement so:

-Rackspace Private Cloud with Folsom
-Redhat on "preview??  Sometime future support" with Folsom so far...?
-SLES cloud 1.0 on Essex :( - probably not
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Scott McCarty

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:26:36 PM4/17/13
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I would say, this is more a function of the OS than the Virtualization stack.

Best Regards
Scott M

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Thomas Vincent" <thomas...@gmail.com>
> To: devops-t...@googlegroups.com
> Cc: devops-t...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 1:25:40 PM
> Subject: Re: Private Cloud Distribution?
>
>
>
> Before going to Openstack I would make sure that the apps you want to
> run on openstack are going to be supported by the vendors.
>
>
> -Tom
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Lewis Marshall <
> le...@technoplusit.co.uk > wrote:
>
>
>
> Is anyone running Openstack internally?
>
>
> Sorry for the long pre-amble...
>
>
> I am looking at running an internal private cloud so DevOps and test
> environments can re-use one hardware pool across multiple different
> service lines. As a side effect of temporary tenancy, we'll try help
> enforce DevOps config management to build hosts from a few standard
> basic images + Puppet (as we already have some initial traction
> here).
>
>
>
> Our primary guest OS will be SUSE SLES SP1 and SP2. Our environments
> range from single dev boxes to ideally staging 100+ guests to run
> together with suitable networking (subnet, firewall, cluster-ware,
> VIPs and load balancers) to faithfully replicate a production
> application service.
>
>
> Aside from several Dev VM's for isolated Puppet Development and
> testing, all our current application environments are physical.
>
>
> Can anyone give any advice about which distribution would be best to
> start with: Rackspace private cloud, Ubuntu, etc etc? Free is an
> obvious benefit at this stage. Ideally we would want to drive the
> cloud API from our own scripts and host CM data.
>
> Thanks in advance for any input.
>
>
> Lewis
>
>
>
>
>

Scott McCarty

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:26:39 PM4/17/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com
Lewis,
There is an early adopter program for OpenStack on RHEL: http://www.redhat.com/products/cloud-computing/openstack/

Best Regards
Scott M

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lewis Marshall" <le...@technoplusit.co.uk>
> To: devops-t...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 1:16:39 PM
> Subject: Private Cloud Distribution?
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
>
> i've been told paid for support is now a requirement so:
>
>
> -Rackspace Private Cloud with Folsom
> -Redhat on " preview?? Sometime future support" with F olsom so

Sean OMeara

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:26:56 PM4/17/13
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I run Joyent Smart Datacenter at home, and find it to be really nice.
It has paid support, and is very mature.

Scott McCarty

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:29:16 PM4/17/13
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BTW,
Think Red Hat Summit time frame for on premise full support:

http://www.redhat.com/summit/sessions/#selected=topic-openstack

Best Regards
Scott M

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Scott McCarty" <scott....@gmail.com>
> To: devops-t...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 1:26:39 PM
> Subject: Re: Private Cloud Distribution?
>

Thomas Vincent

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Apr 17, 2013, 1:25:40 PM4/17/13
to devops-t...@googlegroups.com, devops-t...@googlegroups.com

Before going to Openstack I would make sure that the apps you want to run on openstack are going to be supported by the vendors. 


-Tom


On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Lewis Marshall <le...@technoplusit.co.uk> wrote:

Lewis Marshall

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Apr 17, 2013, 3:03:27 PM4/17/13
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Indeed.

The apps are internal and they and the guest OS runs happily on KVM but indeed a function of the OS.

Lewis.

Lewis Marshall

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Apr 17, 2013, 5:26:47 PM4/17/13
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Thanks Scott, That looks promising.

I guess if we could start free and have a timeline to go paid... Grizzly would be best... need to know what RedHat have planned.

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, Scott McCarty wrote:

Scott McCarty

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Apr 17, 2013, 6:04:25 PM4/17/13
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I know Folsom is in the early adopter program and Red Hat's plan is to track about 2-3 months behind the latest the upstream release, so I suspect you will see Grizzly pretty soon. Folsom was available in the early adopter channel (that's what I use) within weeks of the release. You could easily start with RDO on CentOS or RHEL for testing and move to RHEL/Supported OpenStack in a months. Though, this is not authoritative, I can tell you, you will probably not be able to convert from RDO to a supported model in place. I have never seen Red Hat do this. Generally, with all projects, the supported version is a different set of channels provided at Red Hat Network. This is true with OpenShift, Fedora, even the beta version of Red Hat software.

Just another note, the RDO channel is simpler than what I did, and the first OpenStack install I did was within about 45 minutes, following these instructions.

    https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_OpenStack/

One final note, notice the 2.1 docs don't say preview. I, personally, take that as a sign ;-)

Best Regards
Scott M


Best Regards
Scott M
Scott McCarty
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