openstack

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

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

OpenStack Ironic is one of the most exciting project I had pleasure to work with and help my clients with in the last year. Project Ironic is all about provisioning clusters of Baremetal nodes based on images stored in Glance with assigned networks managed by Neutron.

In the past Ironic has been neglected by System Architects and System Integrators mostly due to lack of feature parity comparable to more traditional baremetal bootstrap mechanisms. Now the feature gap has been mostly closed and at the same time Ironic can take advantages of other components and methodologies...Read more

Red Hat OpenStack 12 is out, so it’s time to re-test Day2 opstools.
Red Hat Cloudforms has been providing day2 operations and monitoring services for OpenStack for as long as I remember. However starting with Red Hat OSP 10 some new tools have been added to ease up operations.  With Red Hat OSP 11 we ended up with three new agents – fluentd, sensu and collecd.

I am not going to focus on installing and integrating Red Hat Cloudforms. I will leave that piece for another blog post in the future. There...Read more

1. Keep it simple

Don’t add unnecessary complexity to your deployment. Try to keep it as close to the reference architecture as possible. This includes:

• adding functionality you might use in the future (this is like buying a truck for towing because one day you might get a boat) - example - sahara, manila etc.  - if you don’t need that extra functionality right now, do not add
...Read more