Tag Archives: OpenStack

WHIR Webinar Notes: Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar & OpenStack

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Panelists: Me (@zehicle) & Joseph B. George (@jbgeorge), Director, Cloud and Big Data Solutions, Dell

Moderator: Liam Eagle (@theWHIR) , Editor-in-Chief, Web Host Industry Review

Wow, this Webinar was an hour of OpenStack insights (see the whole thing). If you don’t have the hour then you can use my time line nodes to jump to what you want to hear.

  • 2:50: Presentation Starts (introductions are over)
  • 3:40: Joseph coins the word “dynormous” for dynamic & large scale clouds
  • 4:40: Customers want to know how they are going to maintain a cloud
  • 4:50: Customers don’t want a 9 month cycle for features, want it faster. DevOps gives us the flexibility to meet our customer needs as quickly as they want to.
  • 7:11: Massive scalability… their (Rackspace & NASA) business is about scale
  • 8:00: Rackspace and NASA started from the beginning to build a community
  • 8:50: We have the data that this has staying power
  • 10:10: We see a lot of companies joining in the community
  • 11:56: Shout out to Opscode Chef
  • 12:40: From bare metal to a fully functioning cloud in under 2 hours. Crowbar allows you to introduce new elements into the environment
  • 13:40: Crowbar leverages our experience with cloud deployments
  • 14:33: Dell was the only provider there from day 1. We have the most experience.
  • 17:27: DevOps Poll
  • 18:40: DevOps is a significant trend that you should consider. Hosters have a lot of operational chops.
  • 19:34: There are a lot of right ways to do cloud. You need to pick what’s best for your business model
  • 20:23: We could get hardware and software, but operational expertise was missing.
  • 21:33: We’re more making the complexity of a cloud go away. We are getting our customers a head start. We are chipping away at the learning curve.
  • 22:05: The cloud is always ready, never finished. Cloud is an ongoing operational environment: DevOps!
  • 23:30: Crowbar bakes a lot of operational experience into the deployment.
  • 25:17: Core tenant of DevOps: there is no single OpenStack image. Cloud is too complex. We build it in layers.
  • 26:26: Before you deploy, you can change the configuration.
  • 27:30: Barclamps are modules that execute a function. We are inviting community participation
  • 28:40: Crowbar process view – Crowbar is a “PXE state machine” is a very simplified description.
  • 29:57: You can go through a tuning cycle where you can get it working, make sure it’s right, flush and reset. That ensures you have an automated system.
  • 30:34: Screen shots with descriptions
  • 33:25: Event the core state machine that runs Crowbar is deployed as a barclamp
  • 35:00: You can download OpenStack and install it yourself from our github. We don’t want to talk about OpenStack, we want to DO OpenStack.
  • Poll Results (see to the right)
  • 38:00: Online resources
  • 40:00: Question 1: Timeline for RHEL. Answer: RHEL is part of Hadoop, will make it into OpenStack by end of year (or sooner based on market demand)
  • 42:17: Question 2: What led Dell to get involved in OpenStack? Answer: It’s about experience. We like being able to fix and change if we needed. There is a lot of active community
  • 45:30: Question 3: How does a hardware maker play with open source software? Answer: It’s a solution for us. We wanted to make sure that people cloud deploy the software. Adding DevOps takes it to another level.
  • 48:00 Question 4: What elements of Diablo are most exciting? Answer: Keystone (centralized authentication) is a big deal. Networking changes that “bust the top” of the networking hurdles.
  • 50:25: Question 5: Where is OpenStack going long term? Answer: We’re pleasantly surprised about how much it’s picked up. We’ll see more standards in the community. We have high hopes for OpenStack and have invested heavily. We’ll see more as-a-service capabilities to build on a common infrastructure: both open and commercial.
  • 52:47: Question 6: What’s the biggest barrier to operating at scale? Answer: learning how to operate is the biggest hurdle. We took a learning approach to help customers get started. We are hosting a training with Rackspace.
  • 55:00: Question 7: Where does Dell and Rackspace overlap? Answer: We see Rackspace Cloud Builders that the premier experts. Dell Services is involved with all of it. Dell takes the phone call and deals with our customers directly.

Please support me for the OpenStack Policy Board

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I’m posting my OpenStack bio here and asking for support putting me on the Policy Board by voting for me.  NOTE: You can only vote if you’re registered and you got the “Poll: OpenStack Governance Elections” email.

Project Policy Board Objective

I am seeking a role on the OpenStack Policy Board to further the adoption of OpenStack within and beyond the community.  As the OpenStack technology lead within Dell, I am the engineer who is most actively engaged with field deployments; consequently, I am uniquely positioned to represent our development community, hosters and enterprise user bases.  I bring substantial process experience (Agile/Lean/CI) into my decision making.  My focus will be on ensuring OpenStack is deployable and ready for use.

Background

I am a Principal Engineer at Dell working as the lead for our OpenStack cloud initiative (http://dell.com/openstack).  My team at Dell is responsible for bringing hyper-scale cloud solutions to market and works closely with our cloud optimized hardware division (DCS).  Before working on the OpenStack project, I was involved in cloud projects for Azure, Eucalyptus, and Joyent at Dell.
My involvement with OpenStack goes back to the very earliest days before the project was launched where I was part of the evaluation team that advocated for Dell to join the project.  Since then, I have been active participant at every design conference.  It was my recommendation that Dell focus on making deployment capabilities for OpenStack and to ensure that those contributions are open sourced (Apache 2).  At this point in the project, I am Dell’s technical authority on OpenStack for community and customer interactions.
My team is responsible for the Crowbar cloud deployer (http://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar).  The purpose of this project is to ensure that OpenStack is be quickly and reliably deployed in a wide range of configurations on any hardware platform.  I believe that ease of deployability is essential for the success of OpenStack as a project because it ensure adoption by non-developers.  I also believe strongly in continuous integration and am working to adapt Crowbar as a CI platform.  I have been the primary driver to ensure that the Crowbar project is open sourced and accepting of input from the community.
My team also designs technical reference architectures (RAs) for OpenStack.  These RAs help drive adoption by providing crisp guidance on how deploy OpenStack.  I am a vocal proponent of open operations (keeping best practices public) and following a DevOps approach for ongoing cloud deployment life-cycles.
In addition to my work at Dell, I work to ensure community access and communication.  My independent blog provides technical detail and insights about the OpenStack and other cloud initiatives.  My blog also focuses on Agile and Lean practices that I believe are essential to success in technology innovation.
I have been working with cloud computing since 2001.  The company I founded with Dave McCrory (@mccrory), now owned by Quest, was the first multi-server VMware ESX deployment ouside of VMware.  We pioneered the concept of elastic vm management (look up the patents!) so I have a very deep understanding of the problems and architectures required.

OpenStack Cloud Training announced by RackSpace. Sessions in London@Rackspace & Austin@Dell

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Talking to WHIR today, Joseph George and I were asked what’s the biggest gap in OpenStack?  Our answer: operator expertise!

That’s why I’m excited to post about  hands on Cloud Builder Training sessions based on the Rackspace training announcement yesterday.

Dell is hosting one of the five-day sessions at our Austin campus (register) starting on October 24th.  Other sessions are in Boston (9/26) and London (10/10).

If you come to the Austin session, I can guarantee you’ll get to meet some of our Austin team (Rob, Joseph, Greg, Victor, AD, Nick and Joey).  I’ll try to setup a visit to the Boston sessions by some of our Nashua NH members (Dan, Scott, Andi, Randy, Audra and Paul).

OpenStack Design Summit regististration open for DEVS! See you in October

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Registration for the OpenStack Conference (which my team at Dell is co-sponsoring), which is now a separate event (from the User Conference the same week) with a separate registration mechanism.

From the OpenStack List:

The Essex Design Summit is an event for the OpenStack developers community (existing and prospective coders) to gather and discuss the upcoming development cycle. It is highly technical in nature and is not targeted to the general OpenStack public, which will find the OpenStack Conference much more enjoyable.

If you think you belong in the former category, please join us. The Summit is free to attend, but with limited attendance, so we require registration.

More details at: http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit/Essex

Crowbar near-term features: increasing DevOps mojo and brewing Diablo

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We’ve been so busy working on getting RHEL support ready to drop into the Crowbar repos that I have not had time to post about what’s coming next for Crowbar. The RHEL addition has required a substantial amount of work to accommodate different packaging models and capabilities. This change moves Crowbar closer to being able allow nodes’ operating systems (the allocated TFTP Boot Image) to be unique per node.

I will post more forward looking details soon but wanted to prime the pump and invite suggestions from our community.

We are tracking two major features for delivery by the OpenStack October Design Conference

  1. OpenStack Diablo Barclamps. Expect to see individual barclamps for various components like Keystone, Dashboard, Glace, Nova, Swift, etc)
  2. Barclamp versioning / connected imports. This feature will enable Crowbar to pull in the latest components for barclamps from remote repositories. I consider this a critical feature for Crowbar’s core DevOps/CloudOps capabilities and to support more community development for barclamps.

We are also working on some UI enhancements

  • Merging together the barclamps/proposals/active views into a single view
  • Enabling bulk actions for nodes (description, BIOS types, and allocate)
  • Allowing users to set node names and showing the names throughout the UI
  • More clarity on state of proposal application process (stretch goal)

I am planning to post more about our design ideas as work begins.

If you want to help with Diablo barclamps, these will be worked in the open and we’d be happy to collaborate. We’re also open to suggestion for what’s next.

Cloudcast interview with Dell Cloud Solutions Team (quotes with time stamps)

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Lloyds BarbershopTheCloudcast.net – Thank you for such a great series of questions. Wow, nearly 36+ minutes of cloudicious interview about the work my team at Dell is doing!

Thanks to our hosts for putting together a great series! They are:

Highlights from Episode 16: Dell, Dude you’re getting a cloud

  • 3:40 JBG “we are listening to our customers tell us what they want to accomplish”
  • 4:40 RAH “humility is part of [what we’re] doing … cloud is about learning and collaboration”
  • 6:40 RAH “OpenStack filled a niche. It was the first open source community cloud. … Not just open source, its open community.”
  • 7:15 RAH “We’re beyond critical mass. We’re seeing acceleration… we are transitioning into a community development.”
  • 7:30 RAH “It’s accelerating. It happening so fast.”
  • 8:00 RAH “We felt it was really important for people to be able to use it. We felt that it was important to get away from just people developing into people using. “
  • 8:57 – RAH “Cloud is not just one thing. You have to have all the pieces.”
  • 10: 15 – RAH “Cloud is always ready, never finished”
  • 10:50 – RAH “OpenStack is an alternative to public cloud including hosting providers seeking to offer their own cloud”
  • 12:40 – AD “Dell has been in the Big data space for many years now”
  • 20:15 – JBG “There’s a legacy of great partnerships that we leverage”
  • 20:48 – JBG “Conflicts have not come up because we are focused on the customer”
  • 21:30 – RAH “Shout out to Greg Althaus for solving these problems in such an elegant way. And we rewrote it 3 times”
  • 22:02 – RAH “Crowbar started from our frustration of bringing up a cloud quickly … so we took a DevOps approach.”
  • 22:41 – RAH “You had to have a system view AND a boot strapping view simultaneously”
  • 23:50 – JBG “Crowbar was born out of necessity because we were setting up and blowing away our clouds over and over and over again. “
  • 24:40 – JBG “We realized there were not many people thinking about all the pieces before OpenStack was installed”
  • 25:20 – RAH “We don’t think customers have all the answers before we show up. This is not unique to OpenStack.”
  • 28:20 – JBG “We’re seeing the community pick up Crowbar as a way to deploy”

Video of Crowbar Install & Introduction (two 15 min videos)

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These Crowbar videos are the first two in a series of how to setup and use your own local Crowbar dev environment (here’s more info & the ISO).   I used VMware Workstation, but any virtual hosts that support Ubuntu 10.10 will work fine.  We use ESX, KVM and Xen for testing too.

Creating this environment is the basis for learning Crowbar, experimenting with OpenStack and creating your own barclamps.  It’s also a handy way to play with Opscode Chef since it includes a stand alone Chef server.

Some items from the install video that I want to re-emphasize:

  • The admin server REQUIRES >1 GB of RAM (more is better)
  • All other nodes REQUIRE > 512 MB of RAM (more depending on what you install)
  • At least TWO NICS are required.
  • You must disable DHCP on the virtual network because Crowbar has a DHCP server and they will conflict.
  • The login for the Crowbar admin server is openstack/openstack.  You must “sudo -i” before you run the install script.
  • The default url for Crowbar is http://192.168.124.10:3000  (crowbar/crowbar)

Installing Crowbar (15 mins)

Introduction to Crowbar (15 mins)

9/30 Bonus Video: How to change the default networking

Continue reading →

Videos about Crowbar, CloudOps, and Dell OpenStack Cloud

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I’m not usually a big fan of launch videos (too much markitecture); however, these turned out to be nice and meaty.  The meaty part explains why it looks like I’m about to eat a big sandwich in the last video.  yum!

  • What is Crowbar: Dell Crowbar Software Overview  

Continue reading →

Crowbar source released, includes OpenStack Cloud install

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I’m delighted to announce (official version) that my team at Dell has opened the Crowbar source under the Apache 2 license. This action is part of the broader Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution which includes OpenStack install packages, Crowbar, reference hardware architectures, and services/consulting to support deployments.

There are two important components to this news:

  1. Dell is officially offering our OpenStack Solution and helping advance the community’s ability to implement OpenStack quickly and consistently.
  2. Dell is releasing the Crowbar code (which is included in the solution) as open source.

Both are significant items; however, my focus here is on the Crowbar release.

Crowbar started as a Dell OpenStack installer project and then grew beyond that in scope.  Now it can be extended to work with other vendors’ kits and other solutions bits.

We are contributing Crowbar to the community because we believe that everyone benefits by sharing in the operational practices that Crowbar embodies. These are rooted in Opscsode Chef (which Crowbar tightly integrates with) and the cloud & hyper-scale proven DevOps practices that are reflected in our deployment model.

Where to get it?

What’s included?

  • A comprehensive set of barclamps to set up an OpenStack cloud.
  • Crowbar UI and Remote APIs to make it easy to set up your cloud
  • Automated testing scripts for community members doing continuous integration with OpenStack.
  • Build scripts so you can create your own Crowbar install ISO
  • Switch discovery so you can create Chef Cookbooks that are network aware.
  • Open source Chef server that powers much of Crowar’s functionality

What’s not included?

  • Non-open source license components (BIOS+RAID config) that we could not distribute under the Apache 2 license.  We are working to address this and include them in our release.  They are available in the Dell Licensed version of Crowbar.
  • Dell Branded Components (skin + overview page).   Crowbar has an OpenSource skin with identical functionality.
  • Pre-built ISOs with install images (you must download the open source components yourself, we cannot redistribute them to you as a package)

Important notes:

  • Crowbar uses Chef Server as its database and relies on cookbooks for node deployments.  It is installed (using Chef Solo) automatically as part of the Crowbar install.
  • Crowbar has a modular architecture so individual components can be removed, extended, and added. These components are known individually as barclamps.
  • Each barclamp has its own Chef configuration, UI sub-component, deployment configuration, and documentation.

On the project roadmap:

  • Hadoop support
  • Additional operating system support (specifically RHEL)
  • Barclamp version repository
  • Network configuration
  • We’d like suggestions!  Please comment!

Sites for more information: Joseph George, Barton George (launch day), Dell

OpenStack at OSCON schedule & event signup

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If you’re at OSCON, here’s where to find OpenStack content:

OpenStack Wednesday Evening Event (RSVP REQUIRED):

Wednesday, July 27, 7-9 pm, at Spirit of 77 (right across from the Oregon
Convention Center at the close of the day).  Join us to toast the first
anniversary of the fastest-growing open source project! Please register here and
help promote the event: http://openstack-one-year.eventbrite.com

Speaking Sessions, Wednesday, July 27


Introduction to OpenStack, Eric Day
Wednesday, 1:40 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/19146

Using OpenStack APIs, Present and Future, Mike Mayo
Wednesday, 4:10 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18550

OpenStack Fundamentals Training Part 1, Swift, John Dickinson
Wednesday, 4:10 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/21287

OpenStack Fundamentals Training Part 2, Nova, Jason Cannavale
Wednesday, 5:00 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/21347

OpenStack One-Year Anniversary Party, Spirit of 77
Wednesday, 7-9 pm http://openstack-one-year.eventbrite.com/

Speaking Sessions, Thursday, July 28

See why Rob says “No Soup for You” about Cloud Deployments.

Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack, Joseph George, Rob Hirschfeld
Thursday, 10:40 am http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/21206

OpenStack + Ceph, Ben Cherian, Jonathan Bryce
Thursday, 1:40 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/21174

Achieving Hybrid Cloud Mobility with OpenStack and XCP, Paul Voccio, Ewan Mellor
Thursday, 2:30 pm http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18726