Schlagwort: 8211

Let’s Meet At OpenStack Summit In Boston!

The post Let’s Meet At OpenStack Summit In Boston! appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.

 
The citizens of Cloud City are suffering — Mirantis is here to help!
 
We&8217;re planning to have a super time at summit, and hope that you can join us in the fight against vendor lock-in. Come to booth C1 to power up on the latest technology and our revolutionary Mirantis Cloud Platform.

If you&8217;d like to talk with our team at the summit, simply contact us and we&8217;ll schedule a meeting.

REQUEST A MEETING

 
Free Mirantis Training @ Summit
Take advantage of our special training offers to power up your skills while you&8217;re at the Summit! Mirantis Training will be offering an Accelerated Bootcamp session before the big event. Our courses will be conveniently held within walking distance of the Hynes Convention Center.

Additionally, we&8217;re offering a discounted Professional-level Certification exam and a free Kubernetes training, both held during the Summit.

 
Mirantis Presentations
Here&8217;s where you can find us during the summit….
 
MONDAY MAY 8

Monday, 12:05pm-12:15pm
Level: Intermediate
Turbo Charged VNFs at 40 gbit/s. Approaches to deliver fast, low latency networking using OpenStack.
(Gregory Elkinbard, Mirantis; Nuage)

Monday, 3:40pm-4:20pm
Level: Intermediate
Project Update – Documentation
(Olga Gusarenko, Mirantis)

Monday, 4:40pm-5:20pm
Level: Intermediate
Cinder Stands Alone
(Ivan Kolodyazhny, Mirantis)

Monday, 5:30pm-6:10pm
Level: Intermediate
m1.Boaty.McBoatface: The joys of flavor planning by popular vote
(Craig Anderson, Mirantis)

 

TUESDAY MAY 9

Tuesday, 2:00pm-2:40pm
Level: Intermediate
Proactive support and Customer care
(Anton Tarasov, Mirantis)

Tuesday, 2:30pm-2:40pm
Level: Advanced
OpenStack, Kubernetes and SaltStack for complete deployment automation
(Aleš Komárek and Thomas Lichtenstein, Mirantis)

Tuesday, 2:50pm-3:30pm
Level: Intermediate
OpenStack Journey: from containers to functions
(Ihor Dvoretskyi, Mirantis; Iron.io, BlueBox)

Tuesday, 4:40pm-5:20pm
Level: Advanced
Point and Click ->CI/CD: Real world look at better OpenStack deployment, sustainability, upgrades!
(Bruce Mathews and Ryan Day, Mirantis; AT&T)

Tuesday, 5:05pm-5:45pm
Level: Intermediate
Workload Onboarding and Lifecycle Management with Heat
(Florin Stingaciu and Lance Haig, Mirantis)

 

WEDNESDAY MAY 10

Wednesday, 9:50am-10:30am
Level: Intermediate
Project Update &8211; Neutron
(Kevin Benton, Mirantis)

Wednesday, 11:00am-11:40am
Level: Intermediate
Project Update &8211; Nova
(Jay Pipes, Mirantis)

Wednesday, 1:50pm-2:30pm
Level: Intermediate
Kuryr-Kubernetes: The seamless path to adding Pods to your datacenter networking
(Ilya Chukhnakov, Mirantis)

Wednesday, 1:50pm-2:30pm
Level: Intermediate
OpenStack: pushing to 5000 nodes and beyond
(Dina Belova and Georgy Okrokvertskhov, Mirantis)

Wednesday, 4:30pm-5:10pm
Level: Intermediate
Project Update &8211; Rally
(Andrey Kurilin, Mirantis)

 

THURSDAY MAY 11

Thursday, 9:50am-10:30am
Level: Intermediate
OSprofiler: evaluating OpenStack
(Dina Belova, Mirantis; VMware)

Thursday, 11:00am-11:40am
Level: Intermediate
Scheduler Wars: A New Hope
(Jay Pipes, Mirantis)

Thursday, 11:30am-11:40am
Level: Beginner
Saving one cloud at a time with tenant care
(Bryan Langston, Mirantis; Comcast)

Thursday, 3:10pm-3:50pm
Level: Advanced
Behind the Scenes with Placement and Resource Tracking in Nova
(Jay Pipes, Mirantis)

Thursday, 5:00pm-5:40pm
Level: Intermediate
Terraforming OpenStack Landscape
(Mykyta Gubenko, Mirantis)

 

Notable Presentations By The Community
 
TUESDAY MAY 9

Tuesday, 11:15am-11:55am
Level: Intermediate
AT&T Container Strategy and OpenStack&8217;s role in it
(AT&038;T)

Tuesday, 11:45am-11:55am
Level: Intermediate
AT&038;T Cloud Evolution : Virtual to Container based (CI/CD)^2
(AT&038;T)

WEDNESDAY MAY 10

Wednesday, 1:50pm-2:30pm
Level: Intermediate
Event Correlation &038; Life Cycle Management – How will they coexist in the NFV world?
(Cox Communications)

Wednesday, 5:20pm-6:00pm
Level: Intermediate
Nova Scheduler: Optimizing, Configuring and Deploying NFV VNF&8217;s on OpenStack
(Wind River)

THURSDAY MAY 11

Thursday, 9:00am-9:40am
Level: Intermediate
ChatOpsing Your Production Openstack Cloud
(Adobe)

Thursday, 11:00am-11:10am
Level: Intermediate
OpenDaylight Network Virtualization solution (NetVirt) with FD.io VPP data plane
(Ericsson)

Thursday, 1:30pm-2:10pm
Level: Beginner
Participating in translation makes you an internationalized OpenStacker &038; developer
(Deutsche Telekom AG)

Thursday, 5:00pm-5:40pm
Level: Beginner
Future of Cloud Networking and Policy Automation
(Cox Communications)

The post Let&8217;s Meet At OpenStack Summit In Boston! appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Quelle: Mirantis

Ten Ways a Cloud Management Platform Makes your Virtualization Life Easier

I spent the last decade working with virtualization platforms and the certifications and accreditation’s that go along with them.  During this time, I thought I understood what it meant to run an efficient data center. After six months of working with Red Hat CloudForms, a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), I now wonder what was I thinking.  I encountered every one of the problems below, each are preventable with the right solution. Remember, we live in the 21st century–shouldn’t the software that we use act like it?

We filled up a data store and all of the machines on it stopped working. 
It does not matter if it is a development environment or the mission critical database cluster, when storage fills up everything stops!  More often than not it is due to an excessive number of snapshots. The good news is CloudForms can quickly be set up with a policy to recognize and prevent this from happening.For example we can check the storage utilization and if it is over 90% full take action, or better yet, when it is within two weeks of being full based on usage trends. That way if manual action is required, there is enough forewarning to do so.  Another good practice is to setup a policy to disable more than a few snapshots. We all love to take snapshots, but there is a real cost to them, and there is no need to let them get out of hand.
I just got thousands of emails telling me that my host is down.The only thing worse than no email alert is receiving thousands of them. In CloudForms it is not only easy to set up alerts, but also to define how often they should be acted upon. For example, check every hour, but only notify once per day.
Your virtual machines (VMs) cannot be migrated because the VM tools updater CD-ROM image was not un-mounted correctly. 
This is a serious issue for a number of reasons.  First it breaks Disaster Recovery (DR) operations and can cause virtual machines to be out of balance. It also disables the ability to put a node into maintenance mode, potentially causing additional outages and delays.Most solutions involve writing a shell script that runs as root and attempts to periodically unmount the virtual CD-ROM drives. These scripts usually work, but are both scary from a security standpoint and indiscriminately dangerous, imagine physically ejecting the CD-ROM while the database administrator is in the middle of a database upgrade!  With CloudForms we can setup a simple policy that can unmount drives once a day, but only after sanity checking that it is the correct CD-ROM image and that the system is in a state where it can be safely unmounted.
I have to manually ensure that all of my systems pass an incredibly detailed and painful compliance check (STIGS, PCI, FIPS, etc.) by next week! 
I have lost weeks of my life to this and if you have not had the pleasure, count yourself lucky.  When the “friendly” auditors show up with a stack of three-ring binders and a mandate to check everything, you might as well clear your calendar for the next few weeks. In addition, since these checks are usually a requirement to continuing operations, expect many of these meetings to involve layers of upper management you did not know existed, and this is definitely not the best time to become acquainted.The good news is CloudForms allows for you to run automatic checks on VMs and hosts. If you are not already familiar with its OpenSCAP scanning capability, you owe yourself a look. Not only that, but if someone attempts to bring a VM online that is not compliant, CloudForms can shut it right back down. That is the type of peace of mind that allows for sleep-filled nights.
Someone logged into a production server as root using the virtual console and broke it.  Now you have to physically hunt down and interrogate all the potential culprits — as well as fix the problem. 
Before you pull out your foam bat and roam the halls to apply some “sense” to the person who did this, it is good to know exactly who it was and what they did. With CloudForms you can see a timeline of each machine, who logged into what console, as well as perform a drift analysis to potentially see what changed.  With this knowledge you can now not only fix the problem, but also “educate” the responsible party.
The developers insist that all VM’s must have 8 vCPU’s and 64GB of RAM. 
The best way to fight flagrant waste or resources is with data.  CloudForms provides the concept of “Right-Sizing” where it will watch VMs operate and determine what resource allocation is the ideal size. With this information in hand CloudForms can either automatically adjust the allocations, or spit out a report to be used to show what the excessive resources are costing.
Someone keeps creating 32bit VM’s with more than 4GB of RAM! 
As we know there is no “good” way that a 32bit VM can possibly use that much memory and it is essentially just waste.  A simple CloudForms policy to check for “OS Type = 32bit” and “RAM > 4GB”, can be a very interesting report to run. Or better yet, put a policy in place to automatically adjust the memory to 4GB and notify the system owner.
I have to buy hardware for next year, but my capacity-planning formula involves a spreadsheet and a dart board. 
Long term planning in IT is hard, especially with dynamic workloads in a multi-cloud environment.  Once CloudForms is running, it automatically collects performance data and executes trend line analysis to assist with operational management. For example, in 23 days you will be out of storage on your production SAN. If that does not get the system administrator’s attention nothing will. It can also perform simulations to see what your environment would look like if you added resources. So you can see your trend lines and capacity if you added another 100 VMs of a particular type and size.
For some reason two hosts were swapping VMs back and forth, and I only found out when people complained about performance. 
As an administrator there is no worse way to find out that something is wrong than being told by a user. Large scale issues such as this can be hard to see from the logs since they consist of typical output. With CloudForms, a timeline overview of the entire environment highlights issues like this and the root cause can be tracked down.
I spend most of my day pushing buttons, spinning up VMs, manually grouping them into virtual folders and tracking them with spreadsheets. 
Before starting a new administrator role it is always good to ask for the “Point of Truth” system that keeps track of what systems are running, where they are, and who is responsible for them.  More often than not the answer is, “A guy, who keeps track of the list, on his laptop”.This may be how it was always done, but now with tools such as CloudForms, you can automatically tag machines based on location, projects, users, or any other combination of characteristics, and as a bonus, can provide usage and costing information back to the user. Gary could only dream of providing that much helpful information.

Conclusion
There is never enough time in the day, and the pace of new technologies is accelerating. The only way to keep up is to automate processes. The tools that got you where you are today are not necessarily the same ones that will get you through the next generation of technologies. It will be critical to have tools that work across multiple infrastructure components and provide the visibility and automation required. This is why you need a cloud management platform and where the real power of CloudForms comes into play.
Quelle: CloudForms

Red Hat Summit 2017 – Planning your OpenStack labs

This year in Boston, MA you can attend the Red Hat Summit 2017, the event to get your updates on open source technologies and meet with all the experts you follow throughout the year.
It’s taking place from May 2-4 and is full of interesting sessions, keynotes, and labs.
This year I was part of the process of selecting the labs you are going to experience at Red Hat Summit and wanted to share here some to help you plan your OpenStack labs experience. These labs are for you to spend time with the experts who will teach you hands-on how to get the most out of your Red Hat OpenStack product.
Each lab is a 2-hour session, so planning is essential to getting the most out of your days at Red Hat Summit.
As you might be struggling to find and plan your sessions together with some lab time, here is an overview of the labs you can find in the session catalog for exact room and times. Each entry includes the lab number, title, abstract, instructors and is linked to the session catalog entry:

L103175 – Deploy Ceph Rados Gateway as a replacement for OpenStack Swift
Come learn about these new features in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10: There is now full support for Ceph Rados Gateway, and “composable roles” let administrators deploy services in a much more flexible way. Ceph capabilities are no longer limited to block only. With a REST object API, you are now able to store and consume your data through a RESTful interface, just like Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift. Ceph Rados Gateway has a 99.9% API compliance with Amazon S3, and it can communicate with the Swift API. In this lab, you&8217;ll tackle the REST object API use case, and to get the most of your Ceph cluster, you&8217;ll learn how to use Red Hat OpenStack Platform director to deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform with dedicated Rados Gateways nodes.
Instructors: Sebastien Han, Gregory Charot, Cyril Lopez
 
L104387 &8211; Hands on for the first time with Red Hat OpenStack Platform
In this lab, an instructor will lead you in configuring and running core OpenStack services in a Red Hat OpenStack Platform environment. We&8217;ll also cover authentication, compute, networking, and storage. If you&8217;re new to Red Hat OpenStack Platform, this session is for you.
Instructors: Rhys Oxenham, Jacob Liberman, Guil Barros
 
L102852 &8211; Hands on with Red Hat OpenStack Platform director
Red Hat OpenStack Platform director is a tool set for installing and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. In this two-hour instructor-led lab, you will deploy and configure a Red Hat OpenStack Platform cloud using OpenStack Platform director. This will be a self-paced, hands-on lab, and it&8217;ll include both the command line and graphical user interfaces. You&8217;ll also learn, in an interactive session, about the architecture and approach of Red Hat OpenStack Platform director.
Instructors: Rhys Oxenham, Jacob Liberman
 
L104665 &8211; The Ceph power show—hands on with Ceph
Join our Ceph architects and experts for this guided, hands-on lab with Red Hat Ceph Storage. You&8217;ll get an expert introduction to Ceph concepts and features, followed by a series of live interactive modules to gain some experience. This lab is perfect for users of all skills, from beginners to experienced users who want to explore advanced features of OpenStack storage. You&8217;ll get some credits to the Red Hat Ceph Storage Test Drive portal that can be used later to learn and evaluate Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage. You&8217;ll leave this session having a better understanding of Ceph architecture and concepts, with experience on Red Hat Ceph Storage, and the confidence to install, set up, and provision Ceph in your own environment.
Instructors: Karan Singh, Kyle Bader, Daniel Messer
As you can see, there is plenty of OpenStack in these hands-on labs to get you through the week and hope to welcome you to one or more of the labs!
Quelle: RedHat Stack

Intelligent NFV performance with OpenContrail

The post Intelligent NFV performance with OpenContrail appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
The private cloud market has changed in the past year, and our customers are no longer interested in just getting an amazing tool for installing OpenStack; instead, they are looking more at use cases. Because we see a lot of interest in NFV cloud use cases, Mirantis includes OpenContrail as the default SDN for its new Mirantis Cloud Platform. In fact, NFV has become a mantra for most service providers, and because Mirantis is a key player in this market, we work on a lot of testing and performance validation.
The most common value for performance comparison between solutions is bandwidth, which shows how much capacity a network connection has for supporting data transfer, as measured in bits per second. In this domain, the OpenContrail vRouter can reach near line speed (about 90%, in fact). However, performance also depends on other factors, such as latency, or packets-per-second (pps), which are as important as bandwidth. Packets per second rate is a key factor for VNF (firewalls, routers, etc.) instances running on top of NFV clouds. In this article, we’ll compare PPS rate for different OpenContrail setups so you can decide what will work best for your specific use case.
The simplest way to test PPS rate is to run a VM to VM test. We will provide a short overview of OpenContrail low-level techniques for NFV infrastructure, and perform a comparative analysis of different approaches using simple PPS benchmarking. To make testing fair, we will use only a 10GbE physical interface, and will limit resource consumption for data plane acceleration technologies, making the environment identical for all approaches.
OpenContrail vRouter modes
For different use cases, Mirantis supports several ways of running the OpenContrail vRouter as part of Mirantis Cloud Platform 1.0 (MCP). Let&8217;s look at each of them before we go ahead and take measurements.
Kernel vRouter
OpenContrail has a module called vRouter that performs data forwarding in the kernel. The vRouter module is an alternative to Linux bridge or Open vSwitch (OVS) in the kernel, and one of its functionalities is encapsulating packets sent to the overlay network and decapsulating packets received from the overlay network. A simplified schematic of VM to VM connectivity for 2 compute nodes can be found in Figure 1:

Figure 1: A simplified schematic of VM to VM connectivity for 2 compute nodes
The problem with a kernel module is that packets-per-second is limited by various factors, such as memory copies, the number of VM exits, and the overhead of processing interrupts. Therefore vRouter can be integrated with the Intel DPDK to optimize PPS performance.
DPDK vRouter
Intel DPDK is an open source set of libraries and drivers that perform fast packet processing by enabling drivers to obtain direct control of the NIC address space and map packets directly into an application. The polling model of NIC drivers helps to avoid the overhead of interrupts from the NIC. To integrate with DPDK, the vRouter can now run in a user process instead of a kernel module. This process links with the DPDK libraries and communicates with the vrouter host agent, which runs as a separate process. The schematic for a simplified overview of vRouter-DPDK based nodes is shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: The schematic for a simplified overview of vRouter-DPDK based nodes
vRouter-DPDK uses user-space packet processing and CPU affinity to dedicate poll mode drivers being served by a particular CPU. This approach enables packets to be processed in user-space during the complete life time – from physical NIC to vhost-user port.
Netronome Agilio Solution
Software and hardware components distributed by Netronome provide an OpenContrail-based platform to perform high-speed packet processing. It’s a scalable, easy to operate solution that includes all server-side networking features, such as overlay networking based on MPLS over UDP/GRE and VXLAN. The Agilio SmartNIC solution supports DPDK, SR-IOV and Express Virtio (XVIO) for data plane acceleration while running the OpenContrail control plane. Wide integration with OpenStack enables you to run VMs with Virtio devices or SR-IOV Passthrough vNICs, as in Figure 3:

Figure 3:  OpenContrail network schematic based on Netronome Agilio SmartNICs and software
A key feature of the Netronome Agilio solution is deep integration with OpenContrail and offloading of lookups and actions for vRouter tables.
Compute nodes based on Agilio SmartNICs and software can work in an OpenStack cluster based on OpenContrail without changes to orchestration. That means it’s scale-independent and can be plugged into existing OpenContrail environments with zero downtime.
Mirantis Cloud Platform can be used as an easy and fast delivery tool to set up Netronome Agilio-based compute nodes and provide orchestration and analysis of the cluster environment. Using Agilio and MCP, it is easily to setup a high-performance cluster with a ready-to-use NFV infrastructure.
Testing scenario
To make the test fair and clear, we will use an OpenStack cluster with two compute nodes. Each node will have a 10GbE NIC for the tenant network.
As we mentioned before, the simplest way to test the PPS rate is to run a VM to VM test. Each VM will have 2 Virtio interfaces to receive and transmit packets, 4 vCPU cores, 4096 MB of RAM and will run Pktgen-DPDK inside to generate and receive a high rate of traffic. For each VM a single Virtio interface will be used for generation, and another interface will be used for receiving incoming traffic from the other VM.
To make an analytic comparison of all technologies, we will not use more than 2 cores for the data plane acceleration engines. The results of the RX PPS rate for all VMs will be considered as a result for the VM to VM test.
First of all, we will try to measure kernel vRouter VM to VM performance. Nodes will be connected with Intel 82599 NICs. The following results were achieved for a UDP traffic performance test:
As you can see, the kernel vRouter is not suitable for providing a high packet per second rate, mostly because the interrupt-based model can’t handle a high rate of packets per second. With 64 byte packets we can only achieve 3% of line rate.
For the DPDK-based vRouter, we achieved the following results:

Based on these results, the DPDK based solution is better at handling high-rated traffic based on small UDP packets.
Lastly, we tested the Netronome Agilio SmartNIC-based compute nodes:

With only 2 forwarder cores, we are able to achieve line-rate speed on Netronome Agilio CX 10GbE SmartNICs on all size of packets.
You can also see a demonstration of the Netronome Agilio Solution here.
Since we have achieved line-rate speed on the 10GbE interface using Netronome Agilio SmartNICs we wanted to have the maximum possible PPS rate based on 2 CPUs. To determine the maximum performance result for this deployment, we will upgrade existing nodes with Netronome Agilio CX 40GbE SmartNIC and repeat the maximum PPS scenario one more time. We will use direct wire connection between 40GbE ports and will set up 64-bytes UDP traffic. Even with hard resources limitations, we achieved:

Rate
Packet size, Bytes

Netronome Agilio Agilio CX 40GbE SmartNIC
19.9 Mpps
64

What we learned
Taking all of the results together, we can see a pattern:

Based on 64 byte UDP traffic, we can also see where each solution stands compared to 10GbE line rate:

Rate
% of line rate

Netronome Agilio
14.9 Mpps
100

vRouter DPDK
4.0 Mpps
26

Kernel vRouter
0.56 Mpps
3

OpenContrail remains the best production-ready SDN solution for OpenStack clusters, but to provide NFV-related infrastructure, OpenContrail can be used in different ways:

The Kernel vRouter, based on interrupt model packet processing, works, but does not satisfy the high PPS rate requirement.
The DPDK-based vRouter significantly improves the PPS rate, but due to high resource consumption and because of defined limitations, it can’t achieve the required performance. We also can assume that using a modern DPDK library will improve performance and optimise resource consumption.
The Netronome Agilio SmartNIC solution significantly improves OpenContrail SDN performance, focusing on saving host resources and providing a stable high-performance infrastructure.

With Mirantis Cloud Platform tooling, it is possible to provision, orchestrate and destroy high performance clusters with various networking features, making networking intelligent and agile.
The post Intelligent NFV performance with OpenContrail appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Quelle: Mirantis