Switching to Openstack?

TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Limpness Supreme
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Feb 8, 2005
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Work's made a decision to go with KVM and such for their next upgrade. I'm a VMware boy. Looking to swap my whole home setup over to KVM and start fiddlin' around. Anyone done the switch before? What gotchas do I need to look out for? How's Infiniband support? IPoIB support? I'm running pretty much purely Supermicro gear, with the occasional Mellanox and Intel cards thrown in.
 
OpenStack, or KVM/libvirt?

Drastically different things, those. One is a hypervisor/management suite, the other is a framerwork for providing compute/network/storage services on demand/programatically using an underlying set of APIs for various hypervisors/network modules/storage modules/whatever.
 
Depending on your company's size, this may be an exercise in futility.
 
Open stack = management
KVM = hypervisor

KVM runs on to of Linux, and you should preferably run with CentOS 6.7. The first step will be to make sure that the hardware for those IB cards are supported and stable in Linux.

Also, you're going to realize very quickly how difficult backups are in an open stack environment. It's not nearly as simple as just pulling backups off the host, we had to resort to putting agents on every VM and pulling backups that way.

Really the effectiveness of open stack is all around your size. If you have only a handful of hosts, Hyper-V is a hell of a lot cheaper than VMWare, and is just as easy to manage
 
DermicSavage said:
Open stack = management
KVM = hypervisor

KVM runs on to of Linux, and you should preferably run with CentOS 6.7. The first step will be to make sure that the hardware for those IB cards are supported and stable in Linux.

Also, you're going to realize very quickly how difficult backups are in an open stack environment. It's not nearly as simple as just pulling backups off the host, we had to resort to putting agents on every VM and pulling backups that way.

Really the effectiveness of open stack is all around your size. If you have only a handful of hosts, Hyper-V is a hell of a lot cheaper than VMWare, and is just as easy to manage
Click to expand...

This. Ideally if you are planning on running Openstack, or any private/public cloud type infrastructure, you are already building your "Vm"s or applications to be ephemeral. You only need to back up your data, as you are building for failure and RGB deployments of sorts. If you are looking to run traditional vm infrastructure, imo this is not the path.
 
4saken said:
This. Ideally if you are planning on running Openstack, or any private/public cloud type infrastructure, you are already building your "Vm"s or applications to be ephemeral. You only need to back up your data, as you are building for failure and RGB deployments of sorts. If you are looking to run traditional vm infrastructure, imo this is not the path.
Click to expand...
Good to know. I'll keep a couple blades for vSphere, I guess. I still need to learn Openstack, though. What's the smallest amount of hardware needed for a full deployment? Can that hardware be virtualized?
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Good to know. I'll keep a couple blades for vSphere, I guess. I still need to learn Openstack, though. What's the smallest amount of hardware needed for a full deployment? Can that hardware be virtualized?
Click to expand...

A single host can run all of it, but it's a goofy config that doesn't resemble production at all.

Much if it can be virtualized. Start reading through the main architecture docs - you'll see how complex it can be :)
 
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