SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5SUSECon 2015

Florian Rommel, Datalounges Oy

@datalounges

https://www.datalounges.com

Welcome!(about me?)

Background: Datalounges• Decades of Multinational Corporate IT in

experience

• Frustrated with vendor offering and sales

tactics with lock-in

• Surveyed medium large (500-1000+

employees) Enterprises about current

Cloud offering and expectations /

preferences

• Catering Enterprise: a whole new level of

pain with HUGE rewards (not monetary).

Todays Hosting Market

• Many Cloud vendors, all the same product

• vServer cheap at first glance, hidden costs ridiculous, example: Azure,

Amazon, Digital Ocean

• Same business model for small businesses, quick servers, not easily

adjustable for enterprise.

• Enterprise = budgeting, budgeting != flexible costs,

• Vendor approach is: Go in on small budget and speed, make customer

adjust to us.

• Overselling in some cases is not anymore based on efficiency but on

cash raking. Ratios of CPU 24-32/1 almost the norm with large vendors,

some vendors go as high as CPU 48-64/1

• RAM overselling the norm at a ratio of 2:1, sometimes 4:1 (swapping)

OpenStack (SUSE OpenStack Cloud)

for the enterprise, ready or notPositives:

• Short answer: yes… mostly

• OpenStack provides flexibility, reliability and elasticity

• Open source, a proper governance and the growth

potential makes OpenStack one of the most ideal OS

Products for Enterprise.

• Ready “distributions” provide Enterprise with support

options and management

• The concept for the user/customer to forget the

hardware layer completely and be able to spin up VMs

based on quotas is very appealing.

OpenStack for the enterprise,

ready or notChallenges:

• Pure OpenStack is NOT easy to maintain

• Monitoring OpenStack is non-existent (DIY or a

combination of many tools, NONE of which is

properly documented)

• To be effective and reliable, OpenStack requires

a good selection of hardware before hosting a VM

can even start.

• In-house proof of concepts are quite difficult and

require a steep learning curve (Time).

SUSE Cloud 5, reasons

behind the choice• Enterprise offering with Enterprise support

• Ease of maintaining and deployment of new resources (Crowbar)

• Well documented setup

• SAP and Microsoft support SLES -> broad support on horizontal

level -> flexibility for customers

• Multi-Hypervisor support out of the box

• Driver Support for Windows

• Designed for large environments requiring flexibility

Infrastructure Design:

Hardware• Blade servers in Multiple Blade Centers

• Rack Servers for additional storage

• Storage over Fibre-channel and multiple 10gbE

channels

• 10gbit Ethernet for Blades for fast deployment

• Multiple gigabit Internet interfaces

• Storage resiliency guaranteed by multiple channels

Infrastructure Design:

Software• SUSE Cloud with SUSE Manager for Patch deployment and

maintenance

• CePH Storage backend with Glance and Cinder interfacing with it

• Customised OpenStack Dashboard (why re-invent the wheel)

• LBaaS, VPNaaS - Site to site and via customised Strongswan

appliance for remote access

• Project/Customer Environment approach, transparently granting

access via VPN tunnels to own environments

• Full Console access to server, Windows 2008, R2, 2012, 2012R2

support and image deployment

• Images for deployment include: SLES (11 and 12), OpenSUSE,

Ubuntu 14.0.X & 15.0X, Windows 64bit (also desktop clients upon

request)

• Combination of Ceilometer and other monitoring tools (working on an

OpenStack monitoring tool which interfaces to ceilometer)

Implementation, the nitty

gritty story• Base install of Admin node done via Admin

appliance from SUSE Studio

• Networking in small steps with long design times

• Several attempts failed due to “human” error

• Research and performance test, failed hardware

• Failover tests, “plug the chord” tests

• Burning the house down!

What Enterprise wants,

Enterprise getsEnterprise..:

• …wants enterprise class support

• …runs large portions on: Windows, Active Directory,

Exchange, ERP Systems (SAP)

• …wants flexibility on the vendors side

• …wants to control the resources and be able to manage

their own “Virtual Datacenter”

• … increasingly would like to have proper budgeting,

foreseeable costs per month

• …wants reliability

Target Market/ Target

ProductsTarget Market:

• Customers who know what they want and are looking for environments,

not just a VM

• Any size company that have the need to grow their infrastructure

• Development Companies who need test and development environments

(SAP, Linux development, Microsoft products)

Target Product examples:

• Delayed replication environments

• Upgrade path environments

• Test and development environments

• Production environments that need flexibility , scalability and reliability

Show and Tell?

Questions?

https://www.datalounges.com

@datalounges