"This article was orignally published on Apr 25, 2016"
Hi Folks,
I’m excited to share with you the publishing of NetApp Technical Report (TR) 4506: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 on FlexPod! If you’d like to deploy the very latest version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform easily, and in an automated and highly available manner on FlexPod, this document is for you!
We’re also proud to contribute customized Heat templates and shell scripting code upstream to Github to help you deploy this solution faster and with less problems! This is the very same templates we’ve used to deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 on FlexPod in our lab!
All of the code is freely available here: TR-4506 GitHub Code
About this document
This document represents an enterprise-grade open hybrid cloud foundation that helps you to deploy OpenStack on an enterprise-class converged infrastructure (FlexPod) built with NetApp® FAS and E-Series storage, Cisco® UCS servers and Cisco Nexus switches, and Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform.
You can find the following and more in the TR:
- Context and Technology Overview as to why FlexPod represents the best enterprise-class converged infrastructure platform for OpenStack deployments.
- Detailed implementation instructions on how to configure a fresh out-of-the-box FAS8040 two-node pair redundantly and prepare it for usage for:
- Cinder volumes and Glance images utilizing NetApp technology exposed to it through the NetApp unified Cinder driver and the NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) Operating System
- Manila shares through the NetApp unified Manila driver and NetApp cDOT
- Stateless computing via iSCSI boot LUNs to eventual Cisco UCS Service Profiles
- Detailed implementation instructions on how to bring up and configure an E5660 dual-controller storage system and prepare it as the backbone for a highly available and resilient OpenStack Object Storage deployment.
- Architectural diagrams and guidance on networking segmentation through 802.1Q VLANs to be utilized in the eventual OpenStack deployment
- Step-by-step instructions on deploying the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, a lifecycle management and orchestration utility (based on the upstream TripleO project) used to:
- discover and introspect via the OpenStack Ironic project the physical server blades to be used for OpenStack
- provide an extensible framework based on Heat orchestration templates (written in Yaml) used to configure and launch an OpenStack deployment
- deploy Red Hat Enteprise Linux 7.2 on bare-metal UCS server blades via iSCSI boot from SAN — the entire root disk of all of the servers in this solution are stored on the NetApp FAS8040 to enable stateless computing, rather than using local disks in the servers themselves
- install and customize all the necessary OpenStack related packages via Puppet in an automated and highly available deployment backed by Pacemaker for service-level HA
- ensure that the newly created overcloud has Cinder volumes and Glance images backed by NFS on the NetApp FAS8040, Swift object and metadata information backed by the NetApp E5660, out of the box with no special user configuration or manual deployment required
- Post Deployment Instructions after the OpenStack deployment is finished:
- Deploy the OpenStack Manila (File-share-as-a-service) project in a highly available, automated fashion with the NetApp Manila driver in the resulting overcloud
- Add additional DM-multipath paths via iSCSI to the resulting overcloud deployment for additional high availability and redundancy
Comprehensive post-deployment validation instructions are provided to show the reader common operations in the resulting overcloud to do the following, all through the Horizon dashboard:
- Create a tenant
- Upload operating system images to the Image service (Glance)
- Create flavors
- Create a project and a user
- Create a tenant network and router
- Set a gateway for the tenant router, and create a Floating IP network
- Create and boot a persistent instance (VMs) from volume
- Associate a floating IP address with this newly created instance
- Verfiy both inbound and outbound network connectivity to the instance
- Provision a file share via the File Share service (Manila) and have the instance mount and write to the share
- Upload objects and verify access to them via the Object Storage service (Swift)
Finally, we also take advantage of the OpenStack Rally project (Benchmark-as-a-service) to demonstrate the advantages and value proposition of using NetApp storage and NetApp software (our Unified Cinder driver for OpenStack) together for a higher performant, space efficient storage foundation for your OpenStack cloud.
Purpose built applicances for OpenStack like the FlexPod converged infrastructure platform contain best-of-breed physical infrastructure and software integrations in OpenStack that help you go further & faster to rolling out OpenStack for Production Deployments versus traditional, do-it-yourself deployments.
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