Schlagwort: 8220

Cloud computing: More than just storage

While the term “#cloud computing” may seem nebulous, it actually has a very simple definition, according to PC Magazine: “storing and accessing data and programs over the internet.”
Most people use some form of cloud computing already, such as a student using Google Docs to work on a paper with a classmate or anyone who accesses their email from the web instead of an application. In other words, the information for the paper or the email don’t exist on the computer’s hardware; it’s stored in the provider’s cloud. Personal storage now requires less effort.
But cloud computing isn’t just for consumers. It’s also revolutionizing the way businesses are, well, doing business.
After choosing from one of the top providers, including IBM, businesses can select from three different service models of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). These services are aptly named. With IaaS, the provider gives the business an entire infrastructure to work with. PaaS enables businesses to create their own custom applications that they can disperse via the cloud. SaaS provides the business with one or more cloud-based software applications to use for their purposes.
At first glance, these services seem fairly straightforward.  However, there are a number of definitive advantages to cloud computing:

It shifts the burden of maintenance and responsibility from the business to the provider. Local computers no longer require the capacity to run all the applications, and the company no longer needs a “whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update [the applications],” according to Salesforce. These differences bring both hardware and IT costs down, as local computers no longer need vast amounts of memory or the cutting-edge processing ability; they simply must be able to connect to the cloud system.
Costs come down further by removing the need for on-site storage. With this remote storage services, companies no longer need to rent or buy physical space and facilities and purchase expensive equipment to store servers and databases, this HowStuffWorks report also points out.
Cloud also offers extreme flexibility. Cloud services are pay per use, and can be adjusted easily to accommodate a company’s needs. SkyHighNetworks provides a good example: “A sales promotion might be wildly popular, and capacity can be added quickly to avoid crashing servers and losing sales. When the sale is over, capacity can shrink to reduce costs.”
Employees across the business can access data and files at any time. Work doesn’t get trapped on users’ hard disks or flash drives, and the information accessed is always the most relevant and updated. This allows for seamless collaboration across geographies and time zones, which is  transformative for multinational companies with offices all around the world.

Like other game-changing technological advances, cloud computing is here to stay.
Learn more about mobile cloud computing.
The post Cloud computing: More than just storage appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Service Catalogs and the User Self-Service Portal

One of the most interesting features of CloudForms is the ability to define services that can include one or more virtual machines (VMs) or instances and can be deployed across hybrid environments. Services can be made available to users through a self-service portal that allows users to order predefined IT services without IT operations getting involved, thereby delivering on one of the major promises of #cloud computing.
The intention of this post is to provide you with step-by-step instructions to get you started with a simple service catalog. After you have gone through the basic concepts, you should have the skills to dive deeper into more complex setups.

Getting started with Service Catalogs
Let’s set the stage for this post: You added your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account to CloudForms as a cloud provider. Your AWS account includes a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image ready to use. Now you want to give your users the ability to deploy RHEL instances on AWS but you want to limit or predefine most of the options they could choose when deploying these instances.
Service Basics
Four items are required to make a service available to users from the CloudForms self-service portal:

A Provisioning Dialog which presents the basic configuration options for a VM or instance.
A Service Dialog where you allow users to configure VM or instance options.
A Service Catalog which is used to group Services Dialogs together.
A Service Catalog Item (ie. the actual Service) which joins a Service Dialog with a Provisioning Dialog.

Provisioning Dialogs
To work with services in CloudForms it is important to understand the concept of Provisioning Dialogs. When you begin the process of provisioning a VM or instance via CloudForms, you are presented with a Provisioning Dialog where you set certain options for the VM or instance. The options presented are dependent on the provider you are using. For instance, a cloud provider might have “flavors” of instances, whereas an infrastructure provider might allow you to set the Memory size or number of CPUs on a VM.
Every provider in CloudForms comes with a sample provisioning dialog covering the options specific to that provider. To have a look at some sample Provisioning Dialogs, go to Automate > Customization > Provisioning Dialogs > VM Provision and select &8220;Sample Provisioning Dialogs&8221;. This is a textual representation of the dialog you will get when you provision a VM or instance.
For this post, we need to make sure instance provisioning to AWS is working, so go to Compute > Clouds > Instances and create a new AWS instance by choosing &8220;Provision Instances&8221; from the &8220;Lifecycle&8221; drop-down. Select the image you are going to use, click “Continue” and walk through the Provisioning Dialog.

Service Dialogs
A Service Dialog determines which options the users get to change. The choice of options that are presented to the user is up to you. You could just give them the option to set the service name, or you could have them change all of the Provisioning Dialog options. You have to create a Service Dialog to define the options users are allowed to see and set. To help with creating a Service Dialog, CloudForms includes a simple form designer.
Anatomy of a Service Dialog
A Service Dialog contains three components:

One or more &8220;Tabs&8221;
Inside the &8220;Tabs&8221;, one or more &8220;Boxes&8221;
Inside the &8220;Boxes&8221;, one or more &8220;Elements&8221;
The &8220;Elements&8221; contain methods, like check boxes, drop-down lists or text fields, to fill in the options on the Provisioning Dialog. Here is the most important part: The names of the Elements have to correspond to the options used in the Provisioning Dialog!

What are the Element Names?
Very good question. As mentioned the options and values we provide in the Service Dialog must match those used in the Provisioning Dialog. There are some rather generic names like &8220;vm_name&8221; or &8220;service_name&8221;, while others might be specific to the provider in question.
So how do you find the options and values you can pass in a Service Dialog? The easiest way is to look at the Provisioning Dialog. In this case, for our Amazon EC2 instance:

As an administrator, go to Automate > Customization
Open the &8220;Provisioning Dialogs&8221; accordion and locate the &8220;VM Provision&8221; folder
Find the appropriate dialog, &8220;Sample Amazon Instance Provisioning Dialog&8221;
Now you can use your browser’s search capabilities to find options and their potential values. For practice just look for e.g. “vm_name”.

Creating a Service Dialog
Enough theory, let’s dive in and create our first simple Service Dialog. The Service Dialog should let users choose a service and instance name for an AWS instance.

As an administrator, go to Automate > Customization
Open the &8220;Service Dialogs&8221; accordion. You will find two example Service Dialogs.
Add a new Service Dialog: Configuration > Add a new Dialog
Type &8220;aws_single_rhel7_instance&8221; into the Label field, this will be the name of the Service Dialog in CloudForms. Add a description if you want, this is not mandatory but good practice.
For Buttons, check &8220;Submit&8221; and &8220;Cancel&8221;.

From this starting point, you can now add content to the Dialog:

From the drop-down with the &8220;+&8221; sign choose &8220;Add a new Tab to this Dialog&8221;.

For Label use &8220;instance_settings&8221;, as Description use &8220;Instance Settings&8221;.
With the &8220;instance_settings&8221; Tab selected choose &8220;Add a new Box to this Tab&8221; from the &8220;+&8221; drop-down.
Give the new Box a Label and Description of &8220;Instance and Service Name&8221;.
From the &8220;+&8221; drop-down choose &8220;Add a new Element to this Box&8221;.
Fill in Label and Description with &8220;Service Name&8221; and Name with &8220;service_name&8221;.
For the Type, choose &8220;Text Box&8221; with Value Type &8220;String&8221;.

Following the same procedure add a second Element to the Box. The Name field should be &8220;vm_name&8221; and the Label and Description fields should be &8220;Instance Name&8221;. Similarly, Type should be &8220;Text Box&8221; with Value Type &8220;String&8221;.

That’s it! Now you can finally hit the &8220;Add&8221; button at the lower right corner.
Create a Catalog
Now that you have created your Service Dialog, we can add it to a Service Catalog by creating its associated Catalog Item.
First, we will create a Catalog:

Go to Services > Catalogs and expand the &8220;Catalogs&8221; accordion.
Select the &8220;All Catalogs&8221; folder and click Configuration > Add a new Catalog.
For Name and Description fill in &8220;Amazon EC2&8221;.
We will assign Catalog Items to this Catalog later.

Create a Catalog Item
Now we have the Catalog without any content, the Service Dialog, and the Provisioning Dialog. To allow users to order the service from the self-service catalog, we have to create a Catalog Item. Let&8217;s create a Catalog Item to order a RHEL instance using our Service Dialog:

Go to Services > Catalogs and expand the &8220;Catalog Items&8221; accordion.
Select the &8220;Amazon EC2&8221; catalog and click Configuration > Add a new Catalog Item.
From the &8220;Catalog Item Type&8221; drop-down select &8220;Amazon&8221;.
For Name and Description use &8220;RHEL Instance&8221; and check the box labelled &8220;Display in Catalog&8221;
From the &8220;Catalog&8221; drop-down choose &8220;Amazon EC2&8221;
From the &8220;Dialog&8221; drop-down choose &8220;aws_single_rhel7_instance&8221;. This is the Service Dialog you created earlier.
The three fields below point to methods used when provisioning/reconfiguring or retiring the service. For now, just configure these to use built-in methods as follows:

Click into the “Provisioning Entry Point State Machine” field, you will be taken to the Datastore Explorer.
Under the “ManageIQ” subtree, navigate to the following method and hit &8220;Apply&8221;: &8220;/Service/Provisioning/StateMachines/ServiceProvision_Template/CatalogItemInitialization&8221;
Click into the “Retirement Entry Point State Machine” field, navigate to this method and hit apply: “/Service/Retirement/StateMachines/ServiceRetirement/Default”

Switch to the &8220;Details&8221; tab. In real life you would put a detailed description of your Service here. You could use HTML for better formatting, but for the purpose of this post &8220;Single Amazon EC2 instance&8221; will do.
Switch to the &8220;Request Info&8221; tab. Here you preset all of the options from the Provisioning Dialog. (Remember that the user is only allowed to set Service Name and the Instance Name options via the Service Dialog):

On the &8220;Catalog&8221; tab, set the image Name to your AWS image name (&8220;rhel7&8221; in this case) and the Instance Name to &8220;changeme&8221;

On the &8220;Properties&8221; tab set the Instance Type to &8220;T2 Micro&8221;. If you ever plan to access the instance you should of course select a &8220;Guest Access Key Pair&8221;, too.

On the &8220;Customize&8221; tab set the Root Password. And in Customize Template choose the &8220;Basic root pass template&8221; as a script for cloud-init.

Click Add at the bottom right.

As you can see your new Catalog Item is listed with a generic icon. Let’s change this by uploading an icon in the &8220;Custom Image&8221; section. You can pick any image you like.
Recap or &8220;What have we done so far&8221;?
We created a Provisioning Dialog that defines the options that can be set on a VM or instance. We created a Service Dialog which allows us to expose certain options to be set by the user. For our example, only the instance name and service name are configurable. Then we created a Service Catalog and finally a Catalog Item. The Catalog Item joins the Service Dialog with all of the options in the Provisioning Dialog. Now, users should be able to order RHEL instance from the self-service catalog.
Let’s Order a RHEL Instance
To order your new service:

Access the self-service portal on https://<your_cf_appliance>/self_service. You will be greeted by the self-service dashboard
Select &8220;Service Catalog&8221; on the menu bar.

You should now see your service. Select it and you will be taken to the form you have defined in your Service Dialog:

Fill in the &8220;Service Name&8221; and &8220;Instance Name&8221; fields. Recall that these are the only two options that you made available to users in your Service Dialog.
Click &8220;Add to Shopping Cart&8221; and access the &8220;Shopping Cart&8221; by clicking the icon on the top right (there should now be a number on it).
Click &8220;Order&8221;. You have created a new provisioning request. You can follow the request by selecting &8220;My Requests&8221; from the menu bar and selecting the specific request to see its progression and details.

Once the &8220;Request State&8221; is shown as &8220;finished&8221;, your AWS instance is provisioned.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating a basic service catalog and to use the self-service portal in CloudForms is not rocket science. Of course, there is a lot more to learn, but there are also a lot of good resources to help you on your journey. For example, articles on this blog, the official documentation, and of course the excellent “Mastering CloudForms Automation” book written by  Peter McGowan that I cannot recommend highly enough.
Quelle: CloudForms

Enterprise cloud strategy: Governance in a multi-cloud environment

Enterprises manage risk.
It’s a business reality that applies as much to #cloud computing as it does to finance, operations or marketing.
To mitigate risk from data loss or downtime, or retain control of enterprise data and application strategy, organizations today often use two or more cloud providers in their cloud environments. This multi-cloud strategy can also improve overall enterprise performance by avoiding &#8220;vendor lock-in&#8221; and making use of different infrastructures to meet the needs of diverse applications.
Whether you&#8217;re a chief information officer or chief technology officer planning or implementing a multi-cloud strategy, you must make some critical decisions, the first being governance. Multi-cloud governance is essential for fast delivery of cloud services while also satisfying enterprise needs for budget control, visibility, security and compliance. It can be broken down into two areas: cloud services brokerage and control-plane abstraction.
Gartner defines cloud services brokerage as an IT role and business model in which a company or other entity adds value to one or more public or private cloud services. The organization does this on behalf of the departments or lines of business that use the service. An IT department can assume the role itself, or the organization may choose to hire a cloud services broker to help. Regardless of how you source your brokerage, consider several questions to know how effective it is:

Can your brokerage strategy compare capabilities of various clouds for workloads? That is, can it determine “which cloud” is appropriate by workload?
Will it help you manage your cloud expenditures across user groups, departments and projects?
Will your brokerage create a holistic view of your IT environment and service-level agreements?

As you answer these questions, remember: integration across disparate APIs and governance processes is key to unlocking multi-cloud governance success. When addressed properly, it can help manage all aspects of your cloud environment, including access and control, security and compliance, and customer records. It can even provide needed visibility into your environment and scale cloud capabilities.
To enable cloud freedom but still meet the enterprise&8217;s security and compliance requirements, you need control-plane abstraction. Control-plane abstraction helps automate delivery of policies, procedures and configurations before cloud services are used. It helps reduce complexities and errors that easily arise in a multi-cloud environment.
That same kind of control is vital for multi-cloud environments. One example: a customer-service application deployed on cloud may need access to authentication, customer data, pricing and other services that are developed and deployed on-premises. Without integration and control, your workloads and applications could have functional deficiencies or security exposures.
To ensure smooth flying through your clouds, you must successfully manage, at a minimum, three facets of control-plane abstraction.
First, the platform must have the ability to orchestrate and automate blueprints and application patterns. For example, it should be able to develop infrastructure and application stacks. Your platform should also be able to deploy hardened images across clouds that adhere to security and compliance requirements.
Second, you need top-notch identity and access management. Your on-premises access policies — particularly role-based access — should be extended to all cloud platforms. Additionally, you must restrict native portal access to each cloud and control management access through common tooling.
Finally, incident, problem and change management solutions should be integrated to provide visibility — the proverbial &8220;single pane of glass&8221; — across multiple cloud environments from diverse providers. Warning: quality and service levels differ between service providers. Know the default services levels for each cloud.
In practical terms, good governance in a multi-cloud environment means not being blindsided by unexpected costs, security problems, or poor platform and API integration. It&8217;s the necessary first step in implementing your cloud strategy, transforming your organization and joining the digital revolution. Once you&8217;ve done it, it&8217;s time to take on applications and data in a multi-cloud environment—which I&8217;ll discuss in my next post
For more information about cloud brokerage services, read &8220;Hybrid IT through Cloud Brokerage&8221;.
The post Enterprise cloud strategy: Governance in a multi-cloud environment appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

IBM wins Frost & Sullivan 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan has conferred its 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award to IBM, citing hybrid integration and affordability as major factors.
Lynda Stadtmueller, Vice President of Cloud Services for Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan, explained the choice of the IBM Cloud platform because it &#8220;supports the concept of &#8216;hybrid integration&#8217; — that is, a hybrid IT environment in which disparate applications and data are linked via a comprehensive integration platform, allowing the apps to share common management functionality and control.&#8221;
The capabilities she noted enable Bluemix users to tap into analytics functionality and Watson.
Stadtmueller continued: “IBM Cloud offers a price-performance advantage over competitors due to its infrastructure configurations and service parameters — including a bare metal server option; single-tenant (private) compute and storage options; granular capacity selections for processing, memory, and network for public cloud units; and all-included technical support.”
IBM VP of Cloud Strategy and Portfolio Management Don Boulia said the award &8220;recognizes the extraordinary range and depth of IBM&8217;s cloud services portfolio.&8221;
Other IBM capabilities Frost & Sullivan cited were its scalable cloud portfolio, extensive connectivity and microservices.
For more, check out Read IT Quik’s full article.
The post IBM wins Frost &#038; Sullivan 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

CloudForms 4.2 Beta 1 (Public)

Welcome to the CloudForms 4.2 Beta 1 release. The beta program will run for a number of weeks starting Halloween 2016.
Please note this is a Beta Blog and therefore should NOT be used to confirm the GA release of this product.
Let&#8217;s break down the mega release into various sections of the platform for a quick review;
Providers
VMware vCloud Air/Director
This new provider has been developed in conjunction with XLAB.SI. It delivers the following capabilities;
Inventory

Collect vApps
Collect Datacenters

Events
Event Catcher and Switchboard support
Metrics &#8211; Not Yet
LifeCycle

Provision vCloud Apps (vApps) from CloudForms Service Catalog and Operations UI

VMware vSphere

New Dashboard for vSphere Provider.
Allow for Cluster only selection &8211; We had a requirement to allow users to select only the cluster, and not specify the host or datastore. So during provisioning on VMware vSphere you can now do this, select only the cluster and if the cluster supports DRS it will automatically decide a host and datastore on the VMware side of the house.
Provisioning with Storage Profiles &8211; Now you can provision in CloudForms supporting VMware Storage Profiles. VMware Storage Profiles let you assign policies to datastores such as production or test. In CloudForms we pre-filter the datastore selection based on these profiles.

Red Hat Virtualization

Snapshot Management &8211; Take/Restore from Snapshots within RHV.
Disk Management &8211; Connect/Disconnect drives to your virtual machines. Fully supporting VM reconfigure.

Middleware (Hawkular)
Inventory

Clusters
Hosts
Entities
Topology
Applications
Templates
Datasources
Drivers
Deployment status
Cross linking

Dedicated performance reports for Hawkular are also included.
Events

Receive Events
Support for Alert Profiles and automated expressions for middleware servers

Metrics
The Hawkular provider supports live metrics. This means that when you view the charts within CloudForms we grab the live metrics from the server at that time for the following,

Datasources
Transactions
JMS Topics
Queues

Life Cycle Operations

Deploy Application
Upload WAR
Create Datasource(s)
Add JDBC Drivers

OpenStack Cloud

Create/Update/Delete OpenStack Cloud Tenants
Create/Update/Delete Host Aggregates
Take and Remove Snapshots at VM level

OpenStack Infrastructure

New topology view of the Under Cloud
Ironic Controls Added for Hosts

Set as Manageable
Introspect Nodes
Provide Nodes

OpenStack Neutron

Create/Update/Delete Router
Create/Update/Delete Network
Create/Update/Delete Subnet
Inventory of Network Ports

OpenStack Swift
New provider in a new Storage menu. This provider class will be built out in future releases.

Inventory

OpenStack Cinder
New provider in a new Storage menu. This provider class will be built out in future releases.

Inventory
Snapshot Support for Volumes exposed in the UI and Automate.
Create/Restore from Backup exposed in the UI and Automate.

OpenShift Enterprise

View Container Templates
Chargeback for container images &8211; Enabling images to support a fixed cost. This can contribute a base image cost to a variable utilised report for pods and applications.
Chargeback based on container image tags.
Support for Custom Attributes &8211; Now we see the OpenShift labels as custom attributes.
Allow policies to prevent image scans, this is useful if you wish to stop CloudForms from inspecting certain images for security or performance reasons.
Reports : Pods for images per project and Pods per node.

Google Cloud

Metrics &8211; CPU, Memory and Network.
Load Balancer Inventory.
Load Balancer Health Checks &8211; Shown in inventory and actionable using automation.
Hide deprecated images from provisioning.
Preemptible Instances &8211; Googles Preemptible Instances are a low cost way of getting compute, coming with restrictions such as termination without notice. CloudForms supports the provisioning of these instances.
Retirement Support.

Microsoft Azure

Additional metrics to CPU such as;

Memory
Disk

Chargeback for Fixed, Allocated and Utilized costs for VM resources.
Support for Floating IPs during provisioning.
Load Balancer inventory.

Microsoft SCVMM

Bug fixes.

Amazon EC2
New CloudForms Appliance Image &8211; This means you can now run CloudForms in Amazon EC2 without any other hosting infrastructure required.
User Interfaces
Both

Single Level Proxy Support &8211; This allows for users to access the remote console for workloads that may be behind a firewall (e.g. service providers). You can configure CloudForms to proxy remote console sessions when direct host visibility is not available. This capability is also exposed to automate.
Notification Draw &8211; Users can receive both Toasts and Notifications from any event happening in CloudForms. This means that during provisioning, as various phases are passed such as approval, quota check, etc., you can notify the user that this has happened. Furthermore, we have enabled this with a helper method in Automate, meaning that any automate method can emit notifications. The notifications can be read or saved. The drawer holds a history of previous notifications.

Operations UI

Topology viewer added for Infrastructures and Cloud Providers.
New toggle view to switch between classic inventory view and new dashboard view.
Schedule automate tasks &8211; Run once or recurring.
VM Explorer Trees &8211;  A new setting has been introduced and set as default. This setting REMOVES the VM&8217;s from the explorer trees, as it caused a substantial performance hit. This setting can be turned back on for smaller environments under My Settings > Services > Workloads > All VMs. The page load time was reduced from 93,770ms to 524ms (99% improvement) with a test of 20,000 VMs.
Timelines &8211; New Timelines component for timelines view on VMs, Providers or other objects supporting this feature.

Service UI

New support for Chargeback roll-up data per My Services. Shows $/$$/$$$ costings.
Service Power Operations &8211; You can now Stop/Start/Suspend an entire service composed of multiple VMs.
Confirmation when deleting items from your shopping cart.
Cockpit Integration &8211; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x systems can be managed/configured using the Cockpit server manager interface. CloudForms now allows launching the Cockpit UI in a new window for systems identified as enabled.

Platform
Chargeback

Numerous changes to Chargeback to improve accuracy in results.

Centralized Administrator

This item is to support some of our larger installations of CloudForms whereby the customer wishes to have one single entry point into CloudForms from any number of regions or zones setup globally. We have supported for some time the notion of a Reporting Region, this allows to report centrally on any data rolled up from child regions to the parent reporting region. With Centralized Administration you can now not only report, but start to perform some of lifecycle tasks too such as;

VM Power Operations &8211; Start/Stop/Suspend a VM in any region from your central region.
VM Retirement &8211; Retire a VM in any region from your central region.

Tenancy
Tenancy has seen two major changes in this release as follows;
OpenStack and our Tenancy
You can now synchronize the tenants that exist within OpenStack to CloudForms. This means you can, as an administrator, define some simple mapping rules and CloudForms will automatically keep the tenants that exist within the OpenStack providers synchronized to those in CloudForms.
CloudForms Tenancy
Ad-hoc sharing of resources across tenants. This will allow users to select an item in their view and share it with anyone in any other tenant in CloudForms.
Database Maintenance
The results from numerous support surveys shows that the database can suffer performance or stability issues when maintenance is not carried out regularly. Therefore we are including in the &#8220;black console&#8221; menus the ability to configure Database Maintenance activities.
Database High Availability
We are supporting in the product, PostgreSQL High Availability. The support is for Primary to Stand-by, you can manually control the swap or use a heartbeat to automatically fail over. The feature is easily enabled using the &8220;Black Console&8221; menu.
Automate

Import Automate Models from GiT Repository

Fully UI configurable and managed.
Post Commit Hooks &8211; Automatically synchronize the changes to the CloudForms appliances enabled with the GiT Server Role.
Tags &8211; Select what is synchronized by Tags.
Branches &8211; Select what is synchronized by Branch.
Supports certificates

Schedule automate tasks &8211; Now you can create tasks that are triggered based on a timed schedule
Notifications &8211; You can $evm.create_notification(:message => &8220;my custom message&8221;). We support error levels and subjects too. This will allow you to provide feedback direct to your users from automate. For example, if you have an automate script that exports, converts and imports a VM from one platform to another, you could notify the user who initiated the task when each phase has completed. Previously the only messaging to the user was email, with notifications you have live feed back through the UI direct to the user.

Quelle: CloudForms

Fuel plugins: Getting Started with Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition and Mirantis OpenStack

The post Fuel plugins: Getting Started with Tesora DBaaS Enterprise Edition and Mirantis OpenStack appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
The Tesora Database as a Service platform is an enterprise-hardened version of Openstack Trove, offering secure private cloud access to the most popular open source and commercial databases through a single consistent interface.
In this guide we will show you how to install Tesora in a Mirantis Openstack environment.
Prerequisites
In order to deploy Tesora DBaaS, you will need a fuel with the Tesora plugin installed.  Start by making sure you have:

A Fuel server up and running. (See the Quick Start for instructions if necessary.)
Discovered nodes for controllers, compute and storage
A discovered node for the dedicated node for the Tesora controller.

Now let&#8217;s go ahead and add the plugin to Fuel.
Step 1 Adding the Tesora Plugin to Fuel
To add the Tesora plugin to Fuel, follow these steps:

Download the tesora plugin from the Mirantis Plugin page, located at:

https://www.mirantis.com/validated-solution-integrations/fuel-plugins/

Once you have downloaded the plugin, copy the plugin file to your Fuel Server using the scp command, as in:
$scp tesora-dbaas-1.7-1.7.7-1.noarch.rpm root@[fuel s:/tmp

After copying the Fuel Plugin to the fuel server, add it to the fuel plugin list. First ssh to the Fuel server:
$ssh root@[fuel server ipi]

Next, add the plugin to Fuel:
[root@fuel ~]# fuel plugins –install tesora-dbaas-1.7-1.7.7-1.noarch.rpm

Finally, verify that the plugin has been added to Fuel:
[root@fuel ~]# fuel plugins
id | name                     | version | package_version
—|————————–|———|—————-
1  | fuel-plugin-tesora-dbaas | 1.7.7   | 4.0.0

If the plugin was successfully added, you should see it listed in the output.
Step 2 Add Tesora DBaaS to an Openstack Environment
From here, it&8217;s a matter of creating an OpenStack cluster that uses the new plugin.  You can do that by following these steps:

Connect to the Fuel UI and log in with the admin credentials using your browser.
Create a new Openstack environment. Follow the prompts and either leave the defaults or alter them to suit your environment.
Before adding new nodes, enter the environment and select the settings tab and then other on the left hand side of the window.
Select Tesora DBaaS Platform and enter the username and password supplied to you by Tesora.  The username and password will be used to download the Database images provided by Tesora to the Tesora DBaaS controller.  Finish by typing &#8220;I Agree&#8221; to show that you agree to the Terms of Use and click Save Settings.
Now create your Environment by assign nodes to the roles for

Compute
Storage
Controller
Tesora DBaaS Controller

As shown in the image below:

After you have finished adding the roles go ahead and deploy the environment.

Step 3 Importing the Database image files to the Tesora DBaaS Controller
Once the environment is built, it&8217;s time to import the database images.  

From the Fuel Server, SSH to the Tesora DBaaS controller server.  You can find the IP address of the Tesora DBaaS controller by entering the following command:
[root@fuel ~]# sudo fuel node list | grep tesora
9  | ready  | Untitled (61:ef) | 4       | 10.20.0.6 | 08:00:27:a3:61:ef | tesora-dbaas    |               | True   | 4

After identifying the IP address you will need to ssh to the fuel server:
[root@fuel ~]# sudo ssh root@10.20.0.6
Warning: Permanently added ‘10.20.0.6’ (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-93-generic x86_64)
* Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/
Last login: Wed Aug 10 23:51:29 2016 from 10.20.0.2

Next load the the pre-built Database images.  After logging into the DBaaS Controller, change your working directory to /opt/tesora/dbaas/bin:
root@node-9:~# cd /opt/tesora/dbaas/bin

Now export your tesora variables:
root@node-9:/opt/tesora/dbaas/bin# source openrc.sh

After setting your variables, you can now import your database images with the following command:
root@node-9:/opt/tesora/dbaas/bin# ./add-datastore.sh mysql 5.6
Installing guest ‘tesora-ubuntu-trusty-mysql-5.6-EE-1.7′

Above is an  example of loading mysql version 5.6.  The format of the command is:
add-datastore.sh DBtype version

To get a list of Database that are available and version please see the link below:

https://tesoradocs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/EE17CE16/Import+Datastore

Once you have imported your Database images, it&8217;s time to go to Horizon.
Step 4 Create and Access a Database Instance
Now you can go ahead and create the actual database. Log into your Horizon dashboard from within Fuel. On the lefthand side, click Tesora Databases.  

From here, you have the following options:

Instances: This option enables you to create, delete and display any database instances that are current running.
Clusters: This option enables you to create and manage a cluster Database environment.
Backups: Create or view backups of any current running Database Images.
Datastores: List all Databases that have been imported
Configuration Groups: This option enables you to manage database configuration tasks by using configuration groups, which make it possible to set configuration parameters, in bulk, on one or more databases.

At this point Tesora DBaaS should be up and running, enabling you to deploy, configure and manage databases in your environment.
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Quelle: Mirantis