Tag Archives: OpenStack

Crowbar 1.2 released includes OpenStack Diablo Final

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With the holiday rush, I neglected to post about Monday’s Crowbar v1.2 release (ISO here)!

The core focus for this release was to support the OpenStack Diablo Final bits (which my employer, Dell, includes as part of the “Dell OpenStack Powered Cloud Solution“); however, we added a lot of other capability as we continue to iterate on Crowbar.

I’m proud of our team’s efforts on this release on both on features and quality.  I’m equally delighted about the Crowbar community engagement via the Crowbar list server.  Crowbar is not hardware or operating system specific so it’s encouraging to hear about deployments on other gear and see the community helping us port to new operating system versions.

We driving more and more content to Crowbar’s Github as we are working to improve community visibility for Crowbar.  As such, I’ve been regularly updating the Crowbar Roadmap.  I’m also trying to make videos for Crowbar training (suggestions welcome!).  Please check back for updates about upcoming plans and sprint activity.

Crowbar Added Features in v1.2:

  • Central feature was OpenStack Diablo Final barclamps (tag “openstack-os-build”)
  • Improved barclamp packaging
  • Added concepts for “meta” barclamps that are suites of other barclamps
  • Proposal queue and ordering
  • New UI states for nodes & barclamps (led spinner!)
  • Install includes self-testing
  • Service monitoring (bluepill)

Looking forward

Dell has a long list of pending Hadoop and OpenStack deployments using these bits so you can expect to see updates and patches matching our field experiences.  We are very sensitive to community input and want to make Crowbar the best way to deliver a sustainable repeatable reference deployment of OpenStack, Hadoop and other cloud technologies.

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 Quantum Update – what I got wrong and where it’s headed

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I’m glad to acknowledge that I incorrectly reported the OpenStack Quantum project would require licensed components for implementation!   I fully stand behind Quantum as being OpenStack’s “killer app” and am happy to post more information about it here.

Side note: My team at Dell is starting to get Crowbar community pings about collaboration on a Quantum barclamp.  Yes, we are interested!

This updates comes via Dan Wendlandt from Nicira who pointed out my error in the Seattle Meetup notes (you can read his comment on that post).  Rather than summarize his information, I’ll let Dan talk for himself…

Dan’s comments about open source Quantum implementation:

There’s a full documentation on how to use Open vSwitch to implement Quantum (see http://docs.openstack.org/incubation/openstack-network/admin/content/ and http://openvswitch.org/openstack/documentation/), and [Dan] even sent a demo link out to the openstack list a while back (http://wiki.openstack.org/QuantumOVSDemo). Open vSwitch 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.

Dan’s comments about Quantum OpenStack project status in the D-E-F release train:

At the end of the Diablo cycle, Quantum applied to become an incubated project, which means it will be incubated for Essex. At the end of the Essex cycle, we plan to apply to be a core project, meaning that if we are accepted, we would be a core project for the F-series release.

Its worth noting, however, that [Dan] knows of many people planning on putting Quantum in production before then, which is the real indicator of a project’s maturity (regardless of whether it is technically “core” or not).

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.

Barclamps: now with added portability!

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I had a question about moving barclamps between solutions.  Since Victor just changed the barclamp build to create a tar for each barclamp (with the debs/rpms), I thought it was the perfect time to explain the new feature.

You can find the barclamps on the Crowbar ISO under “/dell/barclamps” and you can install the TAR onto a Crowbar system using “./barclamp_install foo.tar.gz” where foo is the name of your barclamp.

Here’s a video of how to find and install barclamp tars:

Note: while you can install OpenStack into a Hadoop system, that combination is NOT tested.  We only test OpenStack on Ubuntu 10.10 and Hadoop on RHEL 5.7.   Community help in expanding support is always welcome!

Greg Althaus at 11/15 Austin Cloud User Group meeting (annotated 90 min audio)

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Greg Althaus did a 90 minute Crowbar deep dive at this week’s Austin Cloud User Group.  Brad Knowles recorded audio and posted it so I thought I’d share the link and my annotations.  There are a lot more times to catch up with our team at Dell in Austin, Boston, and Seattle.

Video Annotations –  (##:## time stamp)

  • 00:00 Intros & Meeting Management
  • 12:00 Joseph George Introduction / Sponsorship
  • 16:00 Greg Starts – why Crowbar
  • 19:00 DevOps slides
  • 21:00 What does Crowbar do for DevOps
    • make it easier to manage
    • make it easier to repeat
  • 24:00 What’s included – how we grow / where to start
  • 27:20 Starting to show crowbar – what’s included as barclamps
    • pluggable / configuration
    • Barclamps!
  • 28:10 What is a barclamp
    • discussion about the barclamps in the base
  • 34:30: We ❤ Chef. Puppet vs Chef
  • 36:00 Why barclamps are more than cookbooks
  • 36:30 State machine & transitions
  • Q&A Section
    • 38:50 Reference Architectures
    • 43:00 Barclamps work outside of Crowbar?
    • 44:15 Hardware models supported
    • 47:30 Storage Queston
    • 49:00 HA progress
    • 53:00 Ceph as a distributed cloud on all nodes
    • 56:20 Deployer has a map of how to give out roles
  • 58:00 Demo Fails
  • 58:30 Crowbar Architecture
  • 62:00 How Crowbar can be extended
  • 63:00 Workflow & Proposals
  • 65:40 Meta Barclamps
  • 71:10 Chef Environments
  • 73:40 Taking OpenStack releases and Environments
  • 75:00 The case for remove recipes
  • 77:33 Git Hub Tour
  • 79:00 Network Barclamp deep dive
  • 84:00 Adding switch config (roadmap topic)
  • 86:30 Conduits
  • 87:40 Barclamp Extensions / Services
  • 89:00 Questions
    • 89:20 Proposal operations
    • 93:30 OpenStack Readiness & Crowbar Design Approach
    • 93:10 Network Teaming
    • 94:30 Which OS & Hypervisors
    • 96:30 Continuous Integration & Tools
    • 98:40 BDD (“cucumberesque”) & Testing
    • 99:40 Build approach & barclamp construction
  • 100:00 Wrap up by Joseph

Crowbar community support and 111111 sprint plan

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The Dell Crowbar team is working to improve road map transparency. In the last few weeks, the Crowbar community has become more active on our lists, testing builds, and helping with documentation.

We love the engagement and continue to make supporting the list a priority.

Participation in Crowbar, OpenStack and Hadoop has been exceeding our expectations and we’re working to implement more community support and process. Thank you!!!

Our next steps:

  1. I’ve committed to post sprint plans and summary pages (this is the first)
  2. New Crowbar Twitter account
  3. I’m going to setup feature voting on the Crowbar Facebook page (like to vote)
  4. Continue to work the listserv and videos. We need help converting those to documentation on the crowbar wiki.
  5. Formalize collaborator agreements – we’re working with legal on this
  6. Exploring the option of a barclamp certification program and Crowbar support
  7. Moving to a gated trunk model for internal commits to improve quality
  8. Implementing a continuous integration system that includes core and barclamps. This will be part of our open source components.

We are working towards the 1.2 release (Beta 1) . That release is focused on supporting OpenStack but includes enhancements for upgrades, Hadoop, and additional OS support.

Our Sprint 111111 plan.

Source: Crowbar Wiki: [[sprint 111111]]

  • Theme: OpenStack Diablo Final release candidate.
  • Core Work: Refine Deployment for Nova, Glance, Nova Dashboard (horizon), keystone, swift
  • New additions: mySQL barclamp, Nova HA networking, kong
  • Crowbar internals: expose error states for proposals, allow packages to be included with barclamps to make upgrades easier, barclamp group pages
  • Operating system: added CentOS
  • Documentation: we’ve split the user guides into distinct books so Crowbar, OpenStack, and Hadoop each have their own user guide.
  • Pending action: expose the Hadoop barclamps
  • OS note: OpenStack is being tested (at Dell) against Ubuntu 10.10 only. Hadoop was tested against RHEL 5.7 and we expect it to work against CentOS also.

Rackspace unveils OpenStack reference architecture & private cloud offering

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Yesterday, Rackspace Cloud Builders unveiled both their open reference architecture (RA) and a private cloud offering (on GigaOM) based upon the RA.  The RA (which is well aligned with our Dell OpenStack RA) does a good job laying out the different aspects of an OpenStack deployment.  It also calls for the use of Dell C6100 servers and the open source version of Crowbar.

The Rackspace RA and Crowbar deployment barclamps share the same objective: sharing of best practices for OpenStack operations.

Over the last 12+ months, my team at Dell has had the opportunity to work with many customers on OpenStack deployment designs.  While no two of these are identical, they do share many similarities.  We are pleased to collaborate with Rackspace and others on capturing these practices as operational code (or “opscode” if you want a reference to the Chef cookbooks that are an intrinsic part of Crowbar’s architecture).

In our customer interactions, we hear clearly that Crowbar must remain flexible and ready to adapt to both customer on-site requirements and evolution within the OpenStack code base.  You are also telling us that there is a broader application space for Crowbar and we are listening to that too.

I believe that it will take some time for the community and markets to process today’s Rackspace announcements.  Rackspace is showing strong leadership in both sharing information and commercialization around OpenStack.  Both of these actions will drive responses from the community members.

Talk with Team Crowbar! Online 11/8, Austin 11/15, Boston 11/29 & 11/29 & Seattle 11/30

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My team at Dell has been getting a great response from our community about Crowbar. Thanks! We’re actively working a rock solid OpenStack deployment that will raise the bar on ease of deploy and drive operational excellence.

We have also heard that we need to improve access to the team; consequently, I’m delighted to announce a long list of places and dates where you can access us online AND in person.

Here’s the list:

Or in a calendar view:

Sun Mon Tuesday Wed Thursday Fri Sat
11/8 Online
Crowbar Chat
11/15 Austin
Cloud User
11/29 Boston
OpenStack Meetup		 11/30 Seattle
Crowbar Drinks TBD
12/6 Boston
Opscode BoaF		 12/8 Austin
OpenStack Meetup

Notes from 10/27 OpenStack Austin Meetup (via Stephen Spector)

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Stephen Spector (now a Dell Services employee!) gave me permission to repost his excellent notes from the first OpenStack Austin (#OSATX) Meetup Group.

Here are his notes:

[Stephen] wanted to update everyone on the Austin OpenStack Meetup last night at the Austin TechRanch sponsored by Joseph and Rob (that’s me!) of the Dell OpenStack team (I think I got that right?). You can find all the tweets from the event at https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23osatx as we created a new hashtag for tweeting during the event, #osatx.

Here are some highlights from the event:

  • About 60 or so attendees with a good amount from Dell (Barton George, Logan McCloud)and Rackspace, Opscode (Matt Ray), Puppet Labs, SUSE talked about their OpenStack commitment (http://t.co/bBnIO7xv), and Ubuntu folks as well
  • Jon Dickinson who is the Project Technical Lead for Swift (Object Storage) was there and presented information on the current Swift offering; It is interesting to note that Swift releases continuously when most of OpenStack releases during the 6 month development cycle like Nova (Compute)
  • Stephen and Jim Plamondon from Rackspace presented information on the overall community and talked about the announcement yesterday from Internap about their Compute public cloud and the information on the MercadoLibre 600 Node Compute cloud running their business:

“With 58 million users of MercadoLibre.com and growing rapidly, we need to provide our teams instant access to computing resources without heavy administrative layers. With OpenStack, our internal users can instantly provision what they need without having to wait for a system administrator,” said Alejandro Comisario, Infrastructure Senior Engineer, MercadoLibre, the largest online trading platform in Latin America. “With our success running OpenStack Compute in production, we plan to roll OpenStack Diablo out more broadly across the company, and have appreciated the community support in this venture, especially through the OpenStack Forums, where we are also global moderators.”

  • Discussion on the OpenStack API Issue which is a significant open issue at this time – should OpenStack focus on creating an API specification and then let multiple implementations of that API move forward or build 1 implementation of the API as official OpenStack (see my post for more on this).
  • Greg Althaus gave a demo of the Nova Dashboard
  • Future Meetings
  • Three organizations have offered to help host (pizza $ and TechRanch space $) but we always need more!  You can offer to sponsor via the meetup site.
  • There will be future OpenStack Austin Meetups so sign up for the group and you’ll be notified automatically.

Pictures…

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