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Architecting Openstack For Enterprise Reality: by Paul Miller
Architecting Openstack For Enterprise Reality: by Paul Miller
reality
By Paul Miller
April 7, 2014
OpenStack ................................................................................................................................................ 7
Managing change.................................................................................................................................... 14
Today’s enterprise data center is typically already heavily virtualized. Pools of servers are available for use
across the organization, in a manner that appears increasingly cloud-like. With VMware still dominating
this market for on-premise virtualization, we could argue that customers who have embraced VMware’s
model of virtualization have no real need to take the additional steps required to deploy either public or
private cloud solutions.
In this report, we explore some of the ways in which VMware virtualization and OpenStack-powered
clouds complement each other, and we discuss the efforts of OpenStack Foundation member VMware
and other project participants to simplify the process by which existing enterprise IT investments might
be enriched with the addition of OpenStack.
With well over 50 percent of the world’s x86-based servers likely now devoted to hosting virtualized
workloads and virtualization often exceeding 75 percent of the server estate in larger enterprises,
virtualization is clearly an established technique in the IT toolkit. These virtualized pools of computing
capacity change the way in which IT is provisioned and managed, and they set adopters on a path that
typically leads them toward the even greater flexibility offered by a cloud solution.
Cost, power, cooling, and space savings, as a smaller number of servers can be operated at higher
levels of utilization (virtualized servers typically operate at 80 percent to 90 percent of capacity,
compared with 50 percent to 60 percent or less for non-virtualized servers)
Reduction of vendor lock-in, as the virtualization process creates a layer of abstraction between
the applications and the physical hardware on which they happen to be running today
Faster provisioning, as new virtual machines can be created from a pool of available capacity far
faster (minutes) than a new physical server can be specified, approved, procured, delivered,
installed, and made available (weeks or even months)
Improved reliability, as virtual machines and their applications can often be moved from one
physical server to another without significant impact on users
The hypervisor that controls the virtualization process introduces a slight performance overhead,
perhaps making it more efficient to leave servers devoted to a single application un-virtualized.
Some applications require dedicated access to specific hardware (such as a GPU for intensive
processing), and these will usually perform better without virtualization.
A number of applications still ship with licenses that do not permit virtualization.
Activities such as the Eucalyptus project from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) quickly
offered software that allowed customers to run Amazon-compatible private clouds in their own data
centers. More recently other open-source initiatives like the CloudStack and OpenStack projects gained
traction and grew to become widely supported by a significant proportion of vendors operating in the
market. OpenStack, for example, powers public cloud offerings from Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard, and
others, and it can be downloaded to create private clouds that run inside customer data centers. In
principle, at least, public and private OpenStack clouds can be combined to create a hybrid cloud, and the
OpenStack code distributions from the likes of Rackspace and Canonical are explicitly marketed on this
promise.
VMware is increasingly pushing cloud-like solutions such as the private vCloud Suite and its more
recently launched hybrid equivalent. Both of these are most likely to appeal to customers with an ongoing
and near-exclusive commitment to VMware’s family of products. More-cautious customers may be wary
of the growing risk of lock-in and will therefore look elsewhere.
Source: Google
OpenStack continues to evolve rapidly, with new versions of the code released roughly every six months.
The current version, OpenStack Havana, was released in October 2013. Core capabilities around compute
and storage are relatively mature, but other aspects of the project are not so complete. Across the project,
more emphasis tends to be paid to core functionality than to ease of use, sometimes leading newcomers
to consider OpenStack modules complex or difficult to deploy. A wide range of companies, including
Canonical, Mirantis, and Rackspace, offer professional-services engagements designed to mask some of
Key components
Core components of the OpenStack cloud
Source: OpenStack
OpenStack originally launched with a focus on two core modules, an object-storage module (Swift),
contributed by founding partner Rackspace, and a compute module (Nova), contributed by founding
partner NASA. Development on each of these has continued, with a growing number of contributions
from others too.
The OpenStack project now offers nine core modules, composed of:
1. Nova (compute). One of the original OpenStack modules and still the most widely deployed,
Nova is broadly equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Nova is central to any
OpenStack deployment, providing the APIs that developers use to start, manage, and stop virtual
machines within an OpenStack cloud. Nova is designed to be horizontally scalable and to operate
effectively on commodity hardware. Nova does not include a hypervisor of its own, but it is
2. Swift (object storage). The second of OpenStack’s original modules, Swift is loosely similar to
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Swift provides OpenStack users with a scalable and
redundant object-storage solution, and it should not be confused with the block-storage module
Cinder. Contributors such as SwiftStack have also commercialized Swift for use in OpenStack and
non-OpenStack environments.
6. Keystone (identity service). Keystone is OpenStack’s central directory service, which manages
registration, authorization, and authentication of users. Keystone can integrate with existing
authentication services such as LDAP to reuse user credentials created elsewhere.
7. Glance (image service). Glance is OpenStack’s repository of disk and server images, which can
be used to store and quickly deploy predefined virtual machines (for example, an Ubuntu web
server or database server or a CentOS development machine). Images may be stored locally within
a single OpenStack cloud or shared across a number of clouds with querying via a standard REST
interface.
(Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent
company of Gigaom.)
Adoption to date
According to October 2013 results from the OpenStack Foundation’s ongoing survey of its users,
OpenStack adoption broadly mirrors trends observed in other cloud activities. The majority of reported
deployments are small, with 45 percent constituting less than 100 virtual machine instances and only 6
percent with more than 10,000 instances. Similarly, 67 percent of deployments are across fewer than 50
physical servers, and only 8 percent require more than 1,000. OpenStack use is still dominated by proofs
of concept, with 32 percent of survey respondents reporting running some form of production workload.
Open-source technologies dominate the environments in which OpenStack was deployed at the time of
the survey, with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu (55 percent overall) and CentOS (24 percent overall)
clearly the default choice for host operating systems at all scales of deployment. The KVM hypervisor
used by many Linux distributions is also dominant in 62 percent of responses, but Microsoft’s HyperV
and VMware’s ESX also make the list of chosen hypervisors (3 percent and 8 percent, respectively). The
appearance of enterprise-grade networking from Cisco (10 percent) and VMware’s Nicira (6 percent) as
well as storage solutions from the likes of NetApp (8 percent) and EMC (3 percent) combine to suggest
that some, at least, are trying to integrate OpenStack with solutions less frequently associated with
adopters of open-source projects. Effective deployments that include these companies’ mainstream
solutions will, of course, be key to more-widespread adoption of OpenStack in the future.
Source: VMware
Software-defined networking is at an early point in adoption, but most indicators suggest that the SDN
market is heading toward significant growth. The foundations laid in Neutron should enable those
deploying OpenStack clouds to benefit from a wide range of SDN solutions as these emerge in the market.
VMware’s own cloud products offer one means of achieving these ends, but it is also increasingly feasible
to implement more-open cloud environments (such as OpenStack) without giving up any of the benefits
seen in the already virtualized data center.
Use of the same hypervisor (e.g., KVM) and operating system (e.g., Ubuntu) both on- and off-premise
certainly simplifies that process of extending a cloud, but cooperation among the technology companies
in this space means it is often possible to move workloads across architectures. PayPal, for example,
integrates its existing VMware investment with an OpenStack cloud. That cloud combines virtual
machines using both OpenStack’s dominant KVM hypervisor and VMware’s ESX under a single
management layer.
As OpenStack matures, the code distributions from various partners are becoming increasingly robust
and more tailored to deployment in the sort of mixed environments likely to be found in many production
settings. Both Canonical and Mirantis, for example, offer their own OpenStack distributions, and both
have signed agreements and undertaken development work with VMware to simplify real-world
deployments like PayPal’s.
Production environments are rarely as neat and single-source as the clusters used for pilot deployments
or devtest activities. There are no convincing indications that IT buyers are likely to restrict their options
by buying more from a smaller set of vendors, which would suggest that the IT landscape will continue to
be diverse and complex. Indeed, as the number of choices on the market continues to expand, the
complexly diverse nature of most IT deployments will only grow. As such, efforts to improve
interoperability among different pieces of the whole should be welcomed, and activity to improve
interoperability among VMware solutions and open-source clouds powered by OpenStack is one recent
example of this.
OpenStack has clearly reached a level of maturity at which it is feasible to deploy for key workloads inside
the enterprise data center. The project's rich partner ecosystem includes both the technical
underpinnings to integrate established infrastructure and systems (such as VMware-based virtualization)
and the consultancy and services expertise to support these deployments in production environments.
For those who are ready to embrace a hybridized solution and who wish to reduce the perceived risk of
becoming too dependent on a single technology partner, it's time to seriously explore the opportunity
offered by the OpenStack ecosystem.
OpenStack attracts much of the attention in the open-source cloud space. Adoption still lags far
behind industry leader Amazon, but a growing number of organizations publicly support
OpenStack. These include public and private cloud operators such as Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard,
IBM, and others, as well as smaller companies like Canonical and Mirantis, which can help with
local OpenStack deployments.
Virtualization is a step on the path toward cloud deployment, and it introduces many of the
concepts and procedures needed for an effective cloud.
Organizations do not need to adopt a VMware cloud solution to benefit from existing investment
in VMware virtualization.
Equally, there is no need to throw away existing investment in virtualization in order to build an
OpenStack cloud.
VMware is an active member of the OpenStack Foundation, and there are supported drivers that
simplify the process of managing VMware virtual machines within an OpenStack cloud.
OpenStack continues to evolve, with new code released every six months. There may be value in
working with a partner if you are deploying an OpenStack cloud for production workloads.
Paul was the curator for GigaOM Research’s infrastructure and cloud computing channel during 2011,
routinely acts as a moderator for Gigaom Research webinars, and has authored a number of underwritten
research papers such as this one.
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