Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

OpenStack Deployments Abound at Austin Meetup (12/9) December 14, 2011

I was very impressed by the quality of discussion at the Deployment topic meeting for Austin OpenStack Meetup (#OSATX). Of the 45ish people attending, we had representations for at least 6 different OpenStack deployments (Dell, HP, ATT, Rackspace Internal, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef)!  Considering the scope of those deployments (several are aiming at 1000+ nodes), that’s a truly impressive accomplishment for such a young project.

Even with the depth of the discussion (notes below), we did not go into details on how individual OpenStack components are connected together.  The image my team at Dell uses is included below.  I also recommend reviewing Rackspace’s published reference architecture.

Figure 1 Diablo Software Architecture. Source Dell/OpenStack (cc w/ attribution)

Notes

Our deployment discussion was a round table so it is difficult to link statements back to individuals, but I was able to track companies (mostly).

• HP
  • picked Ubuntu & KVM because they were the most vetted. They are also using Chef for deployment.
  • running Diablo 2, moving to Diablo Final & a flat network model. The network controller is a bottleneck. Their biggest scale issue is RabbitMQ.
  • is creating their own Nova Volume plugin for their block storage.
  • At this point, scale limits are due to simultaneous loading rather than total number of nodes.
  • The Nova node image cache can get corrupted without any notification or way to force a refresh – this defect is being addressed in Essex.
  • has setup availability zones are completely independent (500 node) systems. Expecting to converge them in the future.
• Rackspace
  • is using the latest Ubuntu. Always stays current.
  • using Puppet to setup their cloud.
  • They are expecting to go live on Essex and are keeping their deployment on the Essex trunk. This is causing some extra work but they expect it to pay back by allowing them to get to production on Essex faster.
  • Deploying on XenServer
  • “Devs move fast, Ops not so much.”  Trying to not get behind.
• Rackspace Cloud Builders (RCB) is running major releases being run through an automated test suite. The verified releases are being published to https://github.com/cloudbuilders (note: Crowbar is pulling our OpenStack bits from this repo).
• Dell commented that our customers are using Crowbar primarily pilots – they are learning how to use OpenStack
  • Said they have >10 customer deployments pending
  • ATT is using OpenSource version of Crowbar
  • Need for Keystone and Dashboard were considered essential additions to Diablo
• Hypervisors
  • KVM is considered the top one for now
  • Libvirt (which uses KVM) also supports LXE which people found to be interesting
  • XenServer via XAPI are also popular
  • No so much activity on ESX & HyperV
  • We talked about why some hypervisors are more popular – it’s about the node agent architecture of OpenStack.
• Storage
  • NetApp via Nova Volume appears to be a popular block storage
• Keystone / Dashboard
  • Customers want both together
  • Including keystone/dashboard was considered essential in Diablo. It was part of the reason why Diablo Final was delayed.
  • HP is not using dashboard

• Members of the Audience made comments that we need to deprecate the EC2 APIs (because it does not help OpenStack long term to maintain EC2 APIs over its own).  [1/5 Note: THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL POLICY, it is a reflection of what was discussed]
• HP started on EC2 API but is moving to the OpenStack API

Meetup Housekeeping

• Next meeting is Tuesday 1/10 and sponsored by SUSE (note: Tuesday is just for this January).  Topic TBD.
• We’ve got sponsors for the next SIX meetups! Thanks for Dell (my employeer), Rackspace, HP, SUSE, Canonical and PuppetLabs for sponsoring.
• We discussed topics for the next meetings (see the post image). We’re going to throw it to a vote for guidance.
• The OSATX tag is also being used by Occupy San Antonio.  Enjoy the cross chatter!