I am running OpenInfra Days in Raleigh next week. The event is going to be dominated by Red Hatters, but I also invited folks from other organizations to speak (NASA, Rackspace and more).The focus is mostly around OpenStack, OpenShift and Ceph. Please join me if you can.

Here are the linkedin links to the events:

Day 1 - https://www.linkedin.com/events/openinfradaysraleigh-day17098375297405747200/
Day 2 - https://www.linkedin.com/events/openinfradaysraleigh-day27098376680074870784/
Day 3 - https://www.linkedin.com/events/openinfradaysraleigh-day37098377558676684800/...Read more

As a Solutions Architect and after all the years helping my clients select the right architectures for their use cases or requirements I have come up with a certain realization. My primary job is to identify and present a list of trade-offs for anything that I build (for my clients) and make sure I help them select the best option.  If you have heard the expression - ”You can't have your cake and eat it (too)”, this blog is going to put you in a similar dilemma. I’ll describe four distributed Kubernetes (OpenShift)...Read more

Another day, another "Edge" Architecture. This time let's see how the minimum all-in-one OCP/OCS/CNV would have to look like.

But first what are the key benefits:

• Small footprint

• High Availability

• Virtualization with VM HA

• HCI storage

• Best containers platform there is

Okay, I got you this far, let me reward you now with a short 2 minutes demo on how this is going to work once you're done:

This is part 4 in the series of BareMetal-as-a-Service with Ironic. In this article I will focus on highly distributed architectures. Baremetal cloud as a service for the edge and large environments.

What would be a good use of this architecture? I can think of few examples:

- managing lifecycle of hundreds of individual x86 servers monitoring production of the goods in manufacturing industry 

- almost any x86 based IOT use case

- managing highly distributed infrastructure sitting in stores for the large retailers

- managing unreleased server equipment directly...Read more

I have hesitated to post anything about Red Hat OpenStack Edge since it got introduced in OSP13 simply because I found it quite difficult to consume. Also the storage situation back then was .. not complete. Things improved overtime and now with OSP16.1 we can deploy our private cloud with the following features (which imho finally makes it production ready.):

- ceph storage at the edge / dcn

- one stack per site for better management and lifecycle

- improved routed networking configuration

- image caching at the edge

So why would anyone...Read more

It is not a big deal for me to admit that I am a huge nerd when it comes to managing baremetal infrastructure in the datacenter. I feel like a dying breed in the times where everyone just wants to swipe their credit card and go to the public clouds. Nevertheless, there are still workloads out there that are too expensive to run in public cloud or too sensitive to be exposed in the "public" space. Proper automation and the management of the resources in the datacenter goes a long way in...Read more

I have to admit, it has taken me a while to produce this next article. Today, however it's about to change and I am happy to introduce on this blog OpenShift on OpenStack - no-brain on-prem solution for building apps. What makes this combination so special? Here is the short list of the top integration features:

- Fully Automated IPI experience

- Ability to deploy on mix of VMs and BM nodes

- With true multitenancy for VMs, BMs, Storage, Networking

- Dynamic , multi-tier storage as a service

- Best performance (No double network...Read more

We have a unique opportunity to bring the brightest OpenStack, Cloud and Open Infrastructure engineers, consultants and field experts to Triangle area between February 4th - 6th 2019. Please come join us at the Red Hat Tower these days and learn the latest advancements in Open Infrastructure. We are going to have exciting speakers, talks and demos. You will have opportunity to ask any OpenStack question and with the brain power we have available I have no doubt we will get it covered.

Here are the sessions that are currently scheduled:

Red Hat OpenStack Platform...Read more

So far we have learned how to configure and provision baremetal nodes with OpenStack Ironic in Part 1 of the blog. We also configured our deployment to allow zero-touch discovery in Part 2. The next "LEGO" building block is to allow our tenants/project to isolate their baremetal resources. This unique OpenStack feature can take advantage of neutron to reach out to top of rack switches (TORs) via ml2 driver and dynamically assign a VLAN id to switch ports for corresponding nodes. 

With this functionality, your tenants can take ownership of the pool...Read more

Last year (2017) at OpenStack summit in Boston a friend of mine (Randy Rubins) presented an interesting concept of deploying OpenStack Control plane (together with HCI compute/storage) on Hyper-Converged Red Hat Virtualization Platform (the upstream ovirt). The idea was to capture all the workloads (pets and cattle) in single integrated infrastructure.  I remember sitting there in that conference room and thinking about all the pros and cons of this solution. Both RHV (ovirt) and OpenStack comes with a sets of trade-offs. Combining both platforms together makes it a "Unicorn", hence the reason for Hyper-Cool name.  ...Read more