cloudstack and openstack - experiences?

[BryanWB]

I am looking at both cloudstack an openstack for my office's internal
cloud. Anyone here have experience putting one of them in production?
I am quite curious to hear about what you experienced.

I am inclined towards cloudstack, for the arbitrary reason that it is
coded in java and my office is a java shop. That said, good code is
good code whether it is written in java or python.

[Vladimir Vuksan]

I have not tried cloudstack but I have worked quite a bit with Openstack.
Openstack has ambitious goals however it is pretty "hollow" underneath ie.
there are a lot of things that are not quite there. For example
documentation is severly lacking, getting things going on older
distributions such as RHEL/Centos 5 is an excercise in futility, scheduler
is not very smart etc. Granted I abandoned Openstack implementation about
3 months ago in which time they may have corrected these issues.

What I ended up doing is using OpenNebula. OpenNebula is a lot more basic,
much easier to set up (got it running in couple hours), has fewer
dependencies and so far works great ie. there is nothing to be installed
on VM hosts. All you need is a controller station with public key SSH
access to VM hosts. I can elaborate more if there is interest.

Flipside of trying out Openstack is that I learned a lot about libvirtd
:-).

Vladimir

[Bryan Berry]

thanks for your feedback Vladimir, that's very helpful

the problem you had w/ Centos5, was that installing the openstack infrastucture on rhel/centos5 or creating centos5 vm images?

Did you work w/ openstack's cactus release that was released in April?

[Vladimir Vuksan]

I had problems using Centos5 for Openstack infrastructure. I wrote large
portions of the Centos5 Openstack notes

http://wiki.openstack.org/NovaInstall/CentOSNotes

as well as how to create your own image

http://wiki.openstack.org/CreatingRHELImages

although these days you can just use a stock KVM image without needing to
bundle kernel and ramdisk images.

I did use Cactus.

Vladimir

[David Nalley]

Disclaimer: I work for cloud.com on cloudstack, and I co-maintain
openstack-swift in Fedora- so I have biases all over the place.

I think you'll find cloudstack more featureful (at least from a core
project perspective) and probably more easy for end-users once it's up
and running. However you'll also find that it's a bit less
devops-friendly for initial setup. If you look at the work-in-progress
puppet manifest you'll get an inkling of some of the problems that I
am talking about. [0] Some of those problems are being addressed and
they are getting better.

Openstack, while being a bit more devops friendly also has a more
robust ecosystem surrounding it, I saw a rudimentary, functioning nova
cookbook for chef, and understand there are puppet manifests as well.
As an example of the ecosystem-friendliness - looking at storage is a
great example - you'll notice some people talking about sheepdog
support in cloudstack, while at least volume support for sheepdog is
already present in openstack.

--David

[0] https://gitorious.org/cloudstack-puppet/cloudstack-puppet

[Alex-SF]

Since we're on the subject of OpenStack (an OSS cloud mgt
framework)... how about CloudFoundry (OSS PaaS framework)? Anybody,
using it? Anybody using it along with OpenStack? I'm just now getting
into a project that uses both.

On Jul 10, 9:06 am, David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us> wrote:

[gareth rushgrove]

On 10 July 2011 19:03, Alex-SF <aho...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Since we're on the subject of OpenStack (an OSS cloud mgt
> framework)... how about CloudFoundry (OSS PaaS framework)? Anybody,
> using it? Anybody using it along with OpenStack? I'm just now getting
> into a project that uses both.
>

I've not used CloudFoundry in anger yet, but I have been hacking on it
recently adding Python support [1]. Here are a few impressions.

It's non-rivial to setup and run. Shell scripts and some useful chef
manifests exist, but you really do want to understand how the Ruby
ecosystem works. If you're not familiar with bundler, rvm, gem, etc.
then my guess is you'll run into painful issues.

It doesn't really do anything clever with assets yet, I'd quite like
it to add something like varnish in the same way Heroku has done.

It doesn't yet have a generic approach to running commands, so for
instance running a django migration command or a rake task. If you
know how it's working you can get around this, but in my view it needs
a nice api for this.

The scale out stuff doesn't yet have a solution I'm aware of for the
database side of things, so you'd probably want to manually set up
things like replication. And if you're wanting to do things with
multi-master or master/slave setups you'll have to get into the code.

The lack of a good community discussion place is annoying. The IRC
room is dead (no vmware interaction I'm aware of) and the forum is
more of a support system for the hosted version. The documentation is
also not great. This is probably my biggest bugbear at the moment.

Having said all that I think it's kind of awesome. If you're happy to
read source code the application makes a lot of sense. Adding new
frameworks and services is easy enough too. And the client API is
good. But it's not all install and be happy yet unless your
requirements are very simple.

G

[1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap/pull/57

--
Gareth Rushgrove
Web Geek

morethanseven.net
garethrushgrove.com

[James Turnbull]

Regarding CloudFoundry I wrote a Puppet module to install it ( http://www.kartar.net/2011/05/install-cloud-foundry-vcap-via-puppet/) but have not seen much action around the non-hosted version recently.

Regards

James

[Raphael Ferreira]

Hi
We're a french company specialized in Open Cloud.
The name is eNovance.com and we're based in Paris.

We work on OpenStack and Cloud.com Cloudstack for different companies
in France.

So if you need, we provide you some help to build a cloud
infrastructure based on these solutions.

You can contact me directly if you want.

Have a good day
Raphael Ferreira
eNovance.com

[James Turnbull]

David Nalley wrote:
> cookbook for chef, and understand there are puppet manifests as well.
> As an example of the ecosystem-friendliness - looking at storage is a

There is a recently released set of Puppet modules for Openstack:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-openstack

This is something Rackspace, Canonical and us have been working on and
we'd love some feedback, patches welcome, etc.

Regards

James Turnbull

--
Author of:
* Pro Puppet (http://tinyurl.com/ppuppet)
* Pro Linux System Administration (http://tinyurl.com/linuxadmin)
* Pro Nagios 2.0 (http://tinyurl.com/pronagios)
* Hardening Linux (http://tinyurl.com/hardeninglinux)

[Bryan Berry]

Hey James, I get the following error when I try to apply the all.pp manifest . "hiroko" is the name of my computer

➜  pr  sudo puppet apply --verbose puppetlabs-openstack/manifests/all.pp

Puppet::Parser::AST::Resource failed with error ArgumentError: Invalid resource type class at /home/hitman/pr/puppetlabs-openstack/manifests/all.pp:7 on node hiroko.belkin

line 7 in all.ppp

class { 'mysql::server': }

perhaps i need to install mysql separately?

[Bryan Berry]

tks James, i hope to try it out soon

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 6:29 PM, James Turnbull <ja...@lovedthanlost.net> wrote:

[Bryan Berry]

Natty Narwhal defaults to 2.6.4 but this puppetlabs-openstack requires 2.6.8

sudo apt-get install libxmlrpc-ruby libopenssl-ruby libshadow-ruby1.8 lib

augeas-ruby1.8

I got 2.6.8 installed quickest using the debs from oneiric

wget http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu//pool/main/p/puppet/puppet_2.6.8-1ubuntu1_all.deb \

   http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu//pool/main/p/puppet/puppet-common_2.6.8-1ubuntu1_all.deb \

   http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu//pool/main/f/facter/facter_1.5.9-1ubuntu1_all.deb

minor changes  and seem to have gotten it working, i know i should push this via github but here it is anyways:

sudo cp -R puppetlabs-openstack/modules/* /etc/puppet/modules

NOT
sudo cp -R puppetlabs-openstack/modules/* /etc/puppet/

this isn't the end of the story as manifest is still running.

James, thanks again for your help!

[Keith Hudgins]

I'm coming in late on the discussion, but here's some thoughts for
you:

openstack is new, not fully baked, and the toolchain surrounding it is
still weak. It's ambitious, has lots of promise, and its architecture
is FANTASTIC for scaling to extremely large clouds. However, if you're
not used to managing distributed apps that manage activity via a
messaging bus, getting things running on openstack will take some time
and work. Not to mention the networking you'll have to hand-roll.

Cloudstack is (reasonably) mature and easy to install. It's not that
difficult to take the open source version, set up a couple of NFS
servers, and run a small cloud on cloudstack. The networking is fairly
straightforward and baked in. If you've got vlan-capable switches you
can take advanage of it, but if you don't you can set up straight-
through networking and get stuff running fairly easily.

For a cloud-in-a-closet, I highly recommend cloudstack. It's frankly
the easiest cloud control system to get up and running. It has some
drawbacks: it's a monolithic tomcat app (you can cluster it), the API
is a little wonky (some api request responses, especially errors,
aren't as consistent as I'd like) but it works well for what it is.

If you want to try something a little different, OpenNebula is also
very nice. It's quirky and a pain to install sometimes, but it's
nicely hackable and extensible, which is something neither OpenStack
nor CloudStack can say they are.

I'll reiterate: for a cloud-in-a-closet, go CloudStack... or
OpenNebula.

If your internal cloud is more ambitious than a handful of servers,
then I'd start considering OpenStack, especially if you have some
ability and interest in contributing to the community.

[meveo]

Hello i have a small question about Cloudstack.
It is possible to have CloudStack on my rootserver?
Here my config:
Serverdaten
Servername piix.eu
Hostname piix.eu
Template Ubuntu 11.04 - minimal 64bit
IP-Adress • IP: 8X.XX.XX.XX

Komponents
HDD 2x 320 GB SATA
RAM 4 GB DDR2-RAM
CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 3400+, Dual-Core

I want to create 2 vServer and administer both with CloudStack. One
with my first domain and debian 6, the second with the second domain
and ubuntu 11.10.