Category Archives: Dell

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day 3/8 – Get involved and install with us

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My team at Dell has been avidly tracking the ups, downs, and breakthroughs of the OpenStack Essex release.  While we still have a few milestones before the release is cut, we felt like the E4 release was a good time to begin the work on Essex deployment.  Of course, the final deployment scripts will need substantial baking time after the final release on April 5th; however, getting deployments working will help influence the quality efforts and expand the base of possible testers.

To rally behind Essex Deployments, we are hosting a public work day on Thursday March 8th.

For this work day, we’ll be hosting all-day community events online and physically in Austin and Boston.  We are getting commitments from other Dell teams, partners and customers around the world to collaborate.  The day is promising to deliver some real Essex excitement.

The purpose of these events is to deliver the core of a working OpenStack Essex deployment.  While my team is primarily focused on deploys via Crowbar/Chef, we are encouraging anyone interested in laying down OpenStack Essex to participate.  We will be actively engaged on the OpenStack IRC and mailing lists too.

We have experts in OpenStack, Chef, Crowbar and Operating Systems (Canonical, SUSE, and RHEL) engaged in these activities.

This is a great time to start learning about OpenStack (or Crowbar) with hands-on work.  We are investing substantial upfront time (checkout out the Crowbar wiki for details) to ensure that there is a working base OpenStack Essex deploy on Ubuntu 12.04 beta.  This deploy includes the Crowbar 1.3 beta with some new features specifically designed to make testing faster and easier than ever before.

In the next few days, I’ll cut a 12.04 ISO and OpenStack Barclamp TARs as the basis for the deploy day event.  I’ll also be creating videos that help you quickly get a test lab up and running.  Visit the wiki or meetup sites to register and stay tuned for details!

OpenStack Essex Events (Austin & Boston 3/8, WW Hack Day 3/1, Docs 3/6)

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The excitement over the OpenStack Essex release is building!  While my team has been making plans around the upcoming design summit in SF,  there is more immediate action afoot.

Tomorrow (3/1), numerous sites are gathering around a World Wide Essex Hack Day on 3/1.  If you want to participate or even host a hack venue, get on the list and IRC channel (details).

My team at Dell is organizing a community a follow-up OpenStack Essex Install Day next week (3/8) in both Austin and Boston.  Just like the Hack Day, the install fest will focus on Essex release code with both online and local presence.  Unlike the Hack Day, our focus will be on deployments.  For the Dell team, that means working on the Essex deployment for Crowbar.  We’re still working on a schedule and partner list so stay tuned.  I’m trying to webcast Crowbar & OpenStack training sessions during the install day.

The hack day will close with the regularly scheduled 3/8 OpenStack Austin Meetup (6:30pm at Austin TechRanch).  The topic for the meetup will be, …. wait for it …., the Essex Release.  Thanks go to HP and Dell for sponsoring!

It’s important to note that Anne Gentle is also coordinating an OpenStack Essex Doc Day on 3/6.

To recap:

Wow… that should satisfy your Essex cravings.

Work with me! Our Dell team is hiring architects, engineers & open source gurus

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If you’ve been watching my team’s progress at Dell on Crowbar, OpenStack and Hadoop and want a front row seat in these exciting open source projects then the ball is in our your court!   We are poised to take all three of these projects into new territories that I cannot reveal here, but, take my word for it, there has never been a better time to join our team.

Let me repeat: my team has a lot of open engineering and marketing positions.

Not only are we doing some really kick ass projects, we are also helping redefine how Dell delivers software.  Dell is investing significantly in building our software capabilities and focus.

Basically, we are looking for engineers with a passion for scale applications, devops and open source.   Experience in Hadoop and/or OpenStack will move you to the top of the pile.   These positions say Hadoop, but we’re also looking for OpenStack, DevOps and Chef.  We think like a start-up.

Ideally in Austin, Boston or the Bay.  We’ll also be happy to hear from you if you’ve got l33t chOps but are not as senior as these positions require.
If you are interested, the BEST NEXT  STEP IS TO APPLY ONLINE.
If you don’t want to click the links, I’m attaching the descriptions of the engineering positions after the split.

Continue reading →

Austin OpenStack Meetup: Keystone & Knife (2/20 notes via Greg Althaus)

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I could not make it to the recent Austin OpenStack Meetup, but Greg Althaus generously let me post his notes from the event.

Background

Matt Ray talks about Chef

Matt Ray from Opscode presented some of the work with Chef and OpenStack. He talked about the three main chef repos floating around. He called out Anso’s original cookbook set that is the basis for the Crowbar cookbooks (his second set), and his final set is the emerging set of cookbooks in OpenStack proper. The third one is interesting and what he plans to continue working on to make into his public openstack cookbooks. These are an amalgamation of smokestack, RCB, Anso improvements, and his (Crowbar’s).

He then demoed his knife plugin (slideshare) to build openstack virtual servers using the Openstack API. This is nice and works against TryStack.org (previously “Free Cloud”) and RCB’s demo cloud. All of that is on his github repo with instructions how to build and use. Matt and I talked about trying to get that into our Crowbar distro.

There were some questions about flow and choice of OpenStack API versus Amazon EC2 API because there was already an EC2 knife set of plugins.

Ziad Sawalha talks about Keystone

Ziad Sawalha is the PLT (Project Technical Lead) for Keystone. He works for Rackspace out of San Antonio. He drove up for the meeting.

He split his talk into two pieces, Incubation Process and Keystone Overview. He asked who was interested in what and focused his talk more towards overview than incubation.

Some key take-aways:

  • Keystone comes from Rackspace’s strong, flexible, and scalable API. It started as a known quantity from his perspective.
  • Community trusted nothing his team produced from an API perspective
  • Community is python or nothing
    • His team was ignored until they had a python prototype implementing the API
    • At this point, comments on API came in.
  • Churn in API caused problems with implementation and expectations around the close of Diablo.
    • Because comments were late, changes occurred.
    • Official implementation lagged and stalled into arriving.
  • API has been stable since Diablo final, but code is changing. that is good and shows strength of API.
  • Side note from Greg, Keystone represents to me the power of API over Code. You can have innovation around the implementation as long all the implementations have a fair ground work to plan under which is an API specification. The replacement of Keystone with the Keystone Light code base is an example of this. The only reason this is possible is that the API was sound and documented.  (Rob’s post on this)

Ziad spent the rest of his time talking about the work flow of Keystone and the API points. He covered the API points.

  • Client to Keystone, Keystone to Client for initial auth token
  • Client to Middleware API for the services to have a front.
  • Middleware to Keystone to verify and establish identity.
  • Middleware to Service to pass identity

Not many details other then flow and flexibility. He stressed the API design separated protocol from actions and data at all the layers. This allows for future variations and innovations while maintaining the APIs.

Ziad talked about the state of Essex.

  • Planned
    • RBAC (aka Role Based Access Control)
    • Stability
    • Many backends
  • Actual
    • Code replacement Keystone Light
    • Stability
    • LDAP backend
    • SQL backend

Folsum work:

  • RBAC
  • Stability
  • AD backend
  • Another backend
  • Federation was planned but will most likely be pushed to G
    • Federation is the ability for multiple independent Keystones to operate (bursting use case)
    • Dependent upon two other federation components (networking and billing/metering)

2/9 Webcast about mixing GPUs & Big Data Analysis

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Here’s something from my employer (Dell) that may be interesting to you: it’s about using GPUs for Big Data Analytics.   I meant to discuss/post this earlier, but… oh well.  Here’s the information

Premieres LIVE: 2pm EST (11 AM PST) TODAY  Free  – Register Now!         

What You’ll Learn:

  • Not just for video games any more: GPUs for simulation and parallel processing
  • Impact on business workflows in seismic processing, interpretation and reservoir modeling
  • ROI: 5x performance in 5 days
  • Cost-effective and flexible cluster configurations
  • Show me the metrics: Tangible results from a variety of customers

Need More Details?

OpenStack Boston Meetup 2/1 covers Quantum & Foundation

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My team at Dell was in Beantown (several of us are Nashua based) for an annual team meeting so the timing for this Boston meetup.  Special thanks to Andi Abes for organizing and Suse for Sponsoring!!

We covered two primary topics: Quantum and the OpenStack Foundation.

In typing up my notes from the sessions, I ended up with so much information that it made more sense to break them into independent blog posts. Wow – that’s a lot of value from a free meetup!eetup was ideal for us. While we showed up in force, so did many other Stackers including people from HP, Nicira, Suse, Havard, Voxel, RedHat, ESPN and many more! The turnout for the event was great and I’m taking notes that Austin may need to upgrade our pizza and Boston may need to upgrade their cookies (just sayin’).

The Quantum session by David Lapsley from Nicira talked about the architecture and applications of Quantum. I think that Quantum is an exciting incubated project for OpenStack; however, it is important to remember that Essex stands alone without it. I believe this fact gets forgotten in enthusiasm over Quantum’s shiny potential.

The OpenStack session by Rob Hirschfeld from Dell (me!) talked about the importance of governance for OpenStack and how the Foundation will play a key role in transitioning it from Rackspace to a neutral party. There are many feel-good community benefits that the Foundation brings; however, the collaborators’ ROI is driver for creating a strong foundation. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that fact and using it to create a more sustainable OpenStack.

Why Governance Matters in Open Source: Discussing the OpenStack Foundation

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This post is part of my notes from the 2/1 Boston OpenStack meetup.

OpenStack Foundation

Your’s truly (Rob Hirschfeld) gave the presentation about the OpenStack Foundation.  To readers of this blog, it’s obvious that I’m a believer in the OpenStack mission; however, it’s not obvious how creating a foundation helps with that mission and why OpenStack needs its own. As one person at the meetup put it, “Why not? Every major project needs a foundation!”

Governance does not sound sexy compared to writing code and deploying clouds, but it’s very important to the success of the project.

Here are my notes without the poetic elocution I exuded during the meetup…

The basics:

  • What: Creating a neutral body to govern OpenStack. Rackspace has been leading OpenStack. This means that they own the copyrights, name and also pay the people who organize the community. They committed (to executives at Dell and others) that they would ultimately setup a standalone body to govern the project before the project was public and endorsed by those early partners. Dell (my employer), Citrix, Accenture and NASA were some of biggest names at the Austin conference launch.
  • Why: A neutral body is needed because a lot of companies are committing significant time and money to the project. They cannot risk their investments on Rackspace good will alone. This may mean many things. It could be they don’t like Rackspace direction or they feel that Rackspace is not investing enough.
  • When: Right now and over the next few releases.  You should give feedback right now on the OpenStack Foundations mission.  The actual foundation will take more time to establish because it requires legal work and funding commitments.
  • Who: The community – all stakeholders. This is important stuff! While trying to standup a financially independent Foundation, which requires moneys, the little guys are not left out. There is a clear realization and desire to enable independent developers and contributors and small players to have a seat at the table.
  • How Much: The amounts are unclear, but establishing a foundation will require a significant ongoing investment from highly involved and moneyed parties (Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, HP, Citrix, NTT, startups?, etc).  The funding will pay salaries for people dedicated to the community doing the things that I’ll discuss below.  Overall, the ROI for those investments must be clear!

The foundation does “governance.” But, what does that mean? Here is a list of vitally important work that the foundation is responsible for.

  • Branding – Protecting, certifying, and promoting the OpenStack brand is important because it ensures that “OpenStack” has a valuable and predictable meaning to contributors and users. A strong the brand also means a stronger temptation for people to abuse the brand by claiming compatibility, participation and integration.
  • API – Many would assume that the OpenStack API is the very heart of the project and there is merit to this position. As more and more OpenStack implementations emerge, it is essential that we have a body that can certify which implementations (and even which versions of the implementation!) are valid. This is a substantial value to the community because API integrity ensures project continuity and helps the ecosystem monetize the project. Note: my opinion differs from others here because I think we should favor API over implementation
  • Community – The OpenStack community is not an accident. It is the function of deliberate actions and choices made by Rackspace and supported by key contributors. That community requires virtual and physical places to coalesce and leaders to organize and manage those meeting places. The excellent conferences, wikis, blogs, media awareness, documentation and meetups are a product of consistent community management.
  • Arbitration – An open source community is a family and siblings do not always get along. Today, Rackspace must be very careful about balancing their own interests because they are like the oldest sibling playing the parent role – you can get away with it until something serious happens. We need a neutral party so that Rackspace can protect their own interests (alternate spin: because Rackspace protects their own interests at the expense of the community).
  • Leadership – OpenStack today is a collection of projects with individual leadership. We will increasingly need coordinated leadership as the number of projects and users increases. Centralized leadership is essential because the good of the project as a whole may mean sacrifices within individual projects. It may even mean that some projects chose to leave the OpenStack tent. Stewarding these challenges will require a new level of leadership.
  • Legal – This is a function of all the above but also something more. From a legal stand point, OpenStack be able to represent itself. There is a significant amount of intellectual property being created. It would be foolish to overlook that this property is valuable and needs adequate legal representation.

I used “vitally important” to describe the above items. Is that an exaggeration? Our goal is collaboration and that requires some infrastructure and rules to make it sustainable. We must have a foundation that encourages innovation (multiple implementations) and collaboration (discourages forking). Innovation and collaboration are the heartbeat of an open source project.

The foundation is vitally important because collaboration by competitors is fragile.

In addition to the core areas above, the foundation needs to handle routine tactical items such as:

  • Delivering on milestones & releases
  • Moving new subprojects into OpenStack
  • Electing and maintaining Project Policy Board
  • Electing and maintaining Project Technical Leads
  • Ensuring adherence and extensions to the current bylaws

At the end of the day, OpenStack monetization is the central value for the Foundation.

In order for the OpenStack project, and thus its foundation, to flourish, the contributors, ecosystem, sponsors and users of the project must be able to see a reasonable return (ROI) on their investment. I would love to believe that the foundation is allow about people banding together to solve important problems for the benefit of all; however, it is more realistic to embrace that we can both collaborate and profit simultaneously. Acknowledging the pragmatic self-interested view allows us to create the right incentives and processes as embodied by the OpenStack foundation.

Austin OpenStack Meetup (January Minutes) + OpenStack Foundation Web Cast!

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Sorry for the brevity… At the last Austin OpenStack meetup, we had >60 stackers!  Some from as far away as Portland and Boston (as in Oregon and Massachusetts).

Notes:

  • Suse introduced their OpenStack beta and talked about their Suse Studio that can deploy images against the OpenStack APIs
  • I showed off DevStack.org code that can setup the truck of OpenStack (now Essex) in about 10 minutes on a single node.  Great for developers!
  • I showed an OpenStack Diablo Final deployment from Crowbar.  I focused mainly on Dashboard and used our reference architecture (see below) as illustration of the many parts.
  • Matt Ray suggested everyone watch the webcasts about the OpenStack Foundation (Thurs 6pm central  & Friday 9am central)
  • We planned the next few meetups.
    • For February, we’ll talk about Swift and Dashboard.
    • For March, we’ll talk about Essex and DevStack to prep for the next design summit (in SF).
    • For April, we’ll debrief the conference

Thank you Suse and Dell (my employer) for sponsoring!   The next meetup is sponsored by Canonical.

OpenStack Deployments Abound at Austin Meetup (12/9)

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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
OpenStack API
  • 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!

OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes

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We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg and I), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

  • After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
  • The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
  • There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
  • Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantum Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.
  • HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
  • We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
  • Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Note: cross posted on the OpenStack Blog.

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.

Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts! We’ll also open the floor to other OpenStack topics that would be discussed – open technical and business discussions – no commercials please!

We’ll also talk about organizing future OpenStack meet ups! If your company is interested in sponsoring a future meetup, find Joseph George at the meetup and he can work with you on details.