Bridging the Gap

OpenStack for VMware administrators in the context of a fictional use case

Bridging the Gap

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Presenters

Kenneth HuiTechnology EvangelistRackspaceTwitter: @hui_kenneth

Scott LoweEngineering ArchitectVMware, Inc.Twitter: @scott_lowe

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Agenda

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Agenda• Up first: A tale of two workloads• Fictitious customer use case: how we’ll structure our discussion• Proposed solution: looking at OpenStack and VMware together• Q&A

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A tale of two workloads

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Workload dictates architecture

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Traditional design principles

Monolithic architecture

Stateful Services

Operator focused

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Design goal: Resilient infrastructures

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Cloud-native design principles

Distributed architecture

Developer focusedStateless Services

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Design assumption: Fragile infrastructures

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We architect clouds for rapid scale

11

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Chaos and failures are inevitable at scale

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So design for failure

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• Let the application handle its own resiliency• Build loosely-coupled distributed systems• Use the scale out approach instead of the scale-up approach (scale horizontally not vertically)

• Choose cattle over pets

This translates into certain design guidelines

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Fictitious customer use case

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Our customer is Acme Corporation• Wile E. Coyote is a huge customer, and

business is booming (no pun intended)• Acme runs most of their apps on vSphere,

including some Oracle DBs• IT recently tasked with building out environment

for new mobile applications– Been using AWS for prototyping– Want to bring that in-house but maintain “AWS-like”

experience– Plan to leverage cloud-native application

architectures

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Proposed solution

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Multi-hypervisor OpenStack architecture

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vSphere in OpenStack

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Workload zones

Cloud Controller Cloud Controller

ESXi

ESXi VMs

+N

Oracle Host Aggregate

vCenter

ESXi

ESXi VMs

Compute Node

+N

Compute Node/KVM

KVM VMsApp Host Aggregate

+N

KVM Host Aggregate

Virtual Computer Node

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• Leverage VMware NSX with OpenStack Neutron for cross-hypervisor networking services

• Acme developers can spin up their own isolated logical networks for development and prototyping

• Production workloads can leverage existing IP address space for seamless integration into the rest of the network yet remain isolated from each other

NetworkingPhysical Network(131.107.x.x/16)

Logical Network(131.107.1.x/24)




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vSphere storage in OpenStack

vCenter

ESXi

ESXI VMs

ESXi

ESXI VMsCompute Node

Virtual Computer Node

Cinder Volume Cinder Volume

Cloud Controller

Cinder Node

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• Must build and maintain multiple Glance images– One image needed for each hypervisor in the OpenStack environment– Image metadata associates the image with the appropriate hypervisor

• Development/testing on KVM but production on vSphere can introduce issues• Networking could be challenging without VMware NSX (or other cross-platform Neutron-capable solution)

• Organizational and staff readiness to support multiple hypervisors (“Layer 8” concerns)

Operational challenges of this solution

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Summary

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Key takeaways to remember• OpenStack and VMware’s products (including vSphere) are complementary in

many ways• Workload dictates architecture; different requirements result in different

architectures• Use the right tool for the job

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Questions?

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THANK YOU!Ken [email protected]

Scott [email protected]

Documents

Bridging the Gap