2014-02-21

OpenStack Session Voting

I have submitted three different sessions for the upcoming Openstack Summit in Atlanta. This is the first time I have submitted content for an OpenStack Summit, and I am looking forward to attend the event.

I think the content of these sessions will be highly beneficial to all those who attend, and if you would like to hear some more about these topics at the Summit in May, I would appreciate your vote for one (or more) of the sessions.

Voting closes on Sunday, March 2nd, at 22:00 UTC.  You will need an OpenStack Community member account in order to vote.

OpenStack Summit Atlanta

Here are the three sessions I have proposed.

Deploying Redhat Openstack on UCS - Proposed Deployment Architecture

Deploying a robust OpenStack environment is critical in architectural design. If the foundation of your datacenter is not robust, redundant and scalable - you could encounter difficulties down the road.

In this session I will present a deployment architecture for OpenStack using Redhat OpenStack.

The topics covered in this session will include:

  • What are the benefits gained by deploying on UCS?
  • Why Control nodes should be deployed as virtual machines.
  • When should you deploy a OpenStack Role on bare metal only.
  • How the deployment with RHOS simplifies the process? (Foreman)
  • Scaling the architecture.


Takeaway

It is best to plan your deployment upfront and dedicate proper consideration to how your datacenter will look like in the future. The complications of issues arising when your infrastructure grows could be averted by proper planning and design.


UCS and Openstack - The Integration

Cloud is about abstraction of resources - compute, storage, and network, and when consuming resources in the public cloud - you, the customer don't really care about the physical resources.

But as an cloud administrator - that is a whole different story, especially when it is about your private cloud.

At Cisco we have been working on integrating the physical with the virtual - taking your operations to a whole new level.

During this session you will see the some of the work done to integrate UCS hardware - directly into the Horizon dashboard.

The benefits are substantial:

  • being able to control the virtual and the physical under a single interface
  • being able to access a KVM console of a specific compute nodes when disaster attacks
  • being able to dynamically assign more physical resources to your OpenStack cluster with absolute minimal overhead

That is the something every admin would like and Cisco is working to provide.

The session topics will include:

  • Plugin development
  • UCS API
  • Integration into OpenStack

Takeaway

OpenStack admins are looking for integration of the a full stack, virtual and physical. The UCS plugin for OpenStack provides that insight into the physical resources, reducing TCO for your OpenStack deployments.


Deploying the Openstack Management Layer - the undercloud

Most of us assume that the underlying OpenStack infrastructure is always in place, but there always comes a time where you have to actually put it there.

There are several ways of doing this. PackStack, KickStack, Cisco even have there own implementation - COI.

But how many servers should you deploy on? 

Can they be virtual or do they have to be physical machines?

What are the benefits/drawbacks of either of the above?

During this session I will go over the advantages of actually deploying the management infrastructure as virtual machines or in other words "the undercloud". 

There are several complications and implications when going down this route. 

  • How should you manage this environment?
  • What virtualization platform should you use?
  • Redundancy and high availability.

This talk will also touch on projects in incubation (i.e. Tuskar)

Takeaway

The management components are the most crucial in your OpenStack infrastructure. Learning how to deploy and protect them in an efficient way will assist you in providing the best service to your customers.