Mirantis

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is often qualified as immature and tagged as complicated. Amongst the many solution available on the market, some of them can do a tremendous job of decoupling physical networking from logical networks used by cloud consumers. It then empower end users to deploy whatever architecture they need on their own. So deploying OpenStack without making sure to tackle the networking requirements of your team could be a recipe for failure. ...

OpenStack is evolving at a rapid pace and for those of you that were here in the early beginning, you may have lost track of the new kids on the block. OpenStack CLI tools is one of them, and is a common client which does many things. In this article I’ll not only review this one but will gather all the toolkit at our disposal from the command line to drive Mirantis OpenStack. Please fasten your seat belts ;) ...

In the Enterprise world, user authenticates over an Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) most of the time. Openstack Keystone, the identity service, integrates natively with LDAP directories for authentication and authorization services. The configuration of Keystone can be automated using Mirantis LDAP Fuel Plugin. This article is a step by step guide to integrate Keystone to OpenLDAP but any other LDAP directory including Active Directory could do a perfect job too. Keystone domains The Fuel LDAP Plugin is using the concept of Keystone Domains and put domain specific configuration in ...

In large datacenters it’s common for each rack to live in its own broadcast domain. Fuel allows to deploy nodes on different networks by leveraging its Node Groups functionnality. In this article we’ll details the required steps to make this possible using Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 and we’ll also review Node Groups support improvements coming in MOS 8.0. Terminology In such a large scale architecture, its often required to associate each rack with its own list of logical networks. So we can leverage the Node Groups functionnality of Fuel to create as much network declaration as we require for the following logical networks: ...

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. ...