Tag Archives: RackN

Ceph in an hour? Boring! How about Ceph hardware optimized with advanced topology networking & IPv6?

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This is the most remarkable deployment that I’ve had the pleasure to post about.

The RackN team has refreshed the original OpenCrowbar Ceph deployment to take advantage of the latest capabilities of the platform.  The updated workload (APL2) requires first installing RackN Enterprise or OpenCrowbar.

The update provides five distinct capabilities:

1. Fast and Repeatable

You can go from nothing to a distributed Ceph cluster in an hour.  Need to rehearse on VMs?  That’s even faster.  Want to test and retune your configuration?  Make some changes, take a coffee break and retest.  Of course, with redeploy that fast, you can iterate until you’ve got it exactly right.

2. Automatically Optimized Disc Configuration

The RackN update optimizes the Ceph installation for disk performance by finding and flagging SSDs.  That means that our deploy just works(tm) without you having to reconfigure your OS provisioning scripts or vendor disk layout.

3. Cluster Building and Balancing

This update allows you to place which roles you want on which nodes before you commit to the deployment.  You can decide the right monitor to OSD/MON ratio for your needs.  If you expand your cluster, the system will automatically rebalance the cluster.

4. Advanced Networking Topology & IPv6

Using the network conduit abstraction, you can separate front and back end networks for the cluster.  We also take advantage of native IPv6 support and even use that as the preferred addressing.

5. Both Block and Object Services

Building up from Ready State Core, you can add the Ceph workload and be quickly installing Ceph for block and object storage.
That’s a lot of advanced capabilities included out-of-the-box made possible by having a ops orchestration platform that actually understands metal.
Of course, there’s always more to improve.  Before we take on further automated tuning, we want to hear from you and learn what use-cases are most important.

Manage Hardware like a BOSS – latest OpenCrowbar brings API to Physical Gear

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A few weeks ago, I posted about VMs being squeezed between containers and metal.   That observation comes from our experience fielding the latest metal provisioning feature sets for OpenCrowbar; consequently, so it’s exciting to see the team has cut the next quarterly release:  OpenCrowbar v2.2 (aka Camshaft).  Even better, you can top it off with official software support.

Camshaft coordinates activity

Dual overhead camshaft housing by Neodarkshadow from Wikimedia Commons

The Camshaft release had two primary objectives: Integrations and Services.  Both build on the unique functional operations and ready state approach in Crowbar v2.

1) For Integrations, we’ve been busy leveraging our ready state API to make physical servers work like a cloud.  It gets especially interesting with the RackN burn-in/tear-down workflows added in.  Our prototype Chef Provisioning driver showed how you can use the Crowbar API to spin servers up and down.  We’re now expanding this cloud-like capability for Saltstack, Docker Machine and Pivotal BOSH.

2) For Services, we’ve taken ops decomposition to a new level.  The “secret sauce” for Crowbar is our ability to interweave ops activity between components in the system.  For example, building a cluster requires setting up pieces on different systems in a very specific sequence.  In Camshaft, we’ve added externally registered services (using Consul) into the orchestration.  That means that Crowbar will either use existing DNS, Database, or NTP services or set it’s own.  Basically, Crowbar can now work FIT YOUR EXISTING OPS ENVIRONMENT without forcing a dedicated Crowbar only services like DHCP or DNS.

In addition to all these features, you can now purchase support for OpenCrowbar from RackN (my company).  The Enterprise version includes additional server life-cycle workflow elements and features like HA and Upgrade as they are available.

There are AMAZING features coming in the next release (“Drill”) including a message bus to broadcast events from the system, more operating systems (ESXi, Xenserver, Debian and Mirantis’ Fuel) and increased integration/flexibility with existing operational environments.  Several of these have already been added to the develop branch.

It’s easy to setup and test OpenCrowbar using containers, VMs or metal.  Want to learn more?  Join our community in Gitter, email list or weekly interactive community meetings (Wednesdays @ 9am PT).

Starting RackN – Delivering open ops by pulling an OpenCrowbar Bunny out of our hat

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When Dell pulled out from OpenCrowbar last April, I made a commitment to our community to find a way to keep it going.  Since my exit from Dell early in October 2014, that commitment has taken the form of RackN.

Rack N BlackToday, we’re ready to help people run and expand OpenCrowbar (days away from v2.1!). We’re also seeking investment to make the project more “enterprise-ready” and build integrations that extend ready state.

RackN focuses on maintenance and support of OpenCrowbar for ready state physical provisioning.  We will build the community around Crowbar as an open operations core and extend it with a larger set of hardware support and extensions.  We are building partnerships to build application integration (using Chef, Puppet, Salt, etc) and platform workloads (like OpenStack, Hadoop, Ceph, CloudFoundry and Mesos) above ready state.

I’ve talked with hundreds of people about the state of physical data center operations at scale. Frankly, it’s a scary state of affairs: complexity is increasing for physical infrastructure and we’re blurring the lines by adding commodity networking with local agents into the mix.

Making this jumble of stuff work together is not sexy cloud work – I describe it as internet plumbing to non-technical friends.  It’s unforgiving, complex and full of sharp edge conditions; however, people are excited to hear about our hardware abstraction mission because it solves a real pain for operators.

I hope you’ll stay tuned, or even play along, as we continue the Open Ops journey.