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In my previous article about Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 reduced footprint, I promised to talk about another new functionnality of MOS 7.0, Networking Templates, so here am I. For quite some times, you had no other choice then connecting all of your deployed nodes to all networks, even if they didn’t really need it. For example there isn’t any reason why a Ceph storage node should be connected to the private network, or you may want to segregate different Ceph traffic on different networks. All of this and even more became possible with MOS 7.0 by using Networking Templates. This functionnality is only available from Fuel CLI or API, please note, as soon as you start using templates you can’t use the Web UI to setup node networking any more, execpt if you remove your template. Lets details the process to configure your OpenStack networking environment using networking templates to benefit from the maximum flexibility. ...

Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 got released few days ago and brings OpenStack Kilo and lots of innovation. I’m happy to share with you today a really nice feature, Reduced Footprint offers a way to deploy OpenStack on a small footprint as its name implies, two servers would be a good start. But three servers are still the bare minimum to achieve control plane HA. Fuel will start by deploying a KVM node and then instantiate VMs to deploy OpenStack Controller within it. Fuel can also move itself to the same KVM hypervisor to free up one more physical node. In the end you’ll have a controller and fuel running on one machine, and the other bare metal server will be used as a compute node. That’s exactly the objective of this article so lets get started. ...

Infrastructure as a Service environment generates lots of logs, and by their distributed nature can stay up and running even if some components fails. OpenStack Architects have a difficult question to address, what’s the best tooling around an OpenStack cloud to troubleshoot and monitor it. Mirantis have been working for quite some time on a Fuel Plugins which leverage Elasticsearch, Kibana, InfluxDB, Grafana and Heka. This article shows how to install the plugins, how to deploy an environment with it and the value it brings to an OpenStack cloud. Lets get started. ...

Imagine if you could easily get a virtual load balanced IP address for your fleet of web servers hosted on OpenStack as soon as you need it without having to wait for the networking team who’s managing the hardware load balancer to handle your request ? That’s exactly what OpenStack Neutron is offering with its Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS) technnology which first appeared as an experimental feature in the Grizzly release. It’s built on the same model as the Network as a Service solution, an OpenStack operator can choose whatever load balancing technology which provides an OpenStack Neutron driver. Major load Balancing players like F5 or Citrix offers or will offer LBaaS Neutron drivers. I don’t have such devices in my backyard, so I’ll use the Open Source reference implementation instead (HAproxyNSDriver), based on HAProxy and supported by a french company headquartered in Jouy-en-Josas by the way ! To make things even simpler, I’ll also leverage the Mirantis OpenStack Fuel Plugin for LBaaS which makes installing and configuring LBaaS a breeze. ...

VMware released on march 23rd NSX-v 6.1.3 which now support vSphere 6.0. I was waiting for this release to upgrade my Bulb lab to the latest and greatest, so here am I. In this article, I’ll describe the upgrade process. I’ll start by upgrading NSX to 6.1.3 and continue on by upgrading vCenter Appliance to 6.0. I’m eager to get the latest improvement that both vSphere 6.0 and NSX 6.1.3 offers. ...

For years a big gap existed between embedded OS for smartphone and server operating system. Mark Shuttleworth and his team have been working for quite some time on optimizing their Ubuntu operating system for the smartphone world. Beginning of december, they’ve announced a new transactionnally updated version of Ubuntu optimized for the cloud, the result of their years of working for the embedded world. Snappy is a minimal server image where applications can be upgraded and rolled back atomically. It’s not the only similar initiative, it started with CoreOS, a reachitected Linux OS to run modern infrastructure stacks, but RedHat is also trying to keep up with project Atomic. Snappy can be used to run Docker containers but not only, it’s one of the main differentiator of Canonical solution. ...

Since my last article about Fuel last June 2013, Mirantis have made great progress. It’s now a good time to review the current status of the recently released Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Tech Preview which comes with many new features like complete integration with vCenter and NSX. They’ve also released on Dec 18, 2014 a reference architecture for a deployment integrating with VMware vCenter and NSX. The first time I tried Fuel, I used VMware Fusion to host it. This time, I have a full 3-node vSphere/vSAN cluster up and running which I’ll be using in this article. So it will be a lot closer to a production environment but I won’t be implementating the reference architecture cited above which require bare metal servers for some components and NSX. In this test, everything will be virtualized, which is exactly how VMware Integrated OpenStack VIO is architected. ...

As you’ll see in the following Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP-0453) article, Python 3.4 brings pip and pyvenv by default which is a great move to simplify Python dependencies management by offering a pre-built standard to download and install Python Modules and easily build virtual Python environments. In this article I’ll details how to install Python 3.4.2 from source and I’ll show you how to use pyvenv and pip. Installation from source On Debian, Ubuntu or deritative, first install the pre-requisite to compile Python 3.4 from source ...