What is OpenStack? As defined by OpenStack the mission is to provide scalable, elastic cloud computing for both public and private clouds, large and small. At the heart of our mission is a pair of basic requirements: clouds must be simple to implement and massively scalable.

I have a love for learning new technologies and a better understanding of how to make these technologies work together to achieve a goal. This could be more company focused goals like how to reduce the cost and footprint of my existing IT infrastructure while increasing performance, reliability, and security to simply how do I use three virtual PCs to do some mathematical computation that would otherwise take years without. As I have learned many times and have resisted at the same time these new methods, technologies, and architectures that bring new paths to our ever growing world of information technology. The point here is, adoption of new technology is not always easy but is demanded as change in ways like described above can only help and with this let’s open the discussion to OpenStack.

First let me start by giving you where I started with my knowledge gathering. I started by researching online… You know startpage, google, yahoo, and places like this to see where I should start and what I should start with. Aside from the fact I was at Rackspace at the time of the OpenStack development I needed to understand more than what I was told and what I saw. This led me to a few places:

• Books either paper or digital
  • O’Reilly’ Books
    • Deploying OpenStack
• Docs.openstack.ork
  • OpenStack Compute Administration Manual
  • Web content
    • Luunchpad.net
      • Posts and information
• Wiki.openstack.org

Starting here will give you as much information as you will need to get off and running as well as provide for other places to pull information from.

There are currently seven primary components of OpenStack: Compute, Object Storage, Identity, Dashboard, Network, Block Storage, and Image Service. Below is a brief description of each component and its codename.

• Object Store (codenamed “Swift”) provides object storage. It allows you to store or retrieve files (but not mount directories like a fileserver). Several companies provide commercial storage services based on Swift. These include KT, Rackspace (from which Swift originated) and Internap. Swift is also used internally at many large companies to store their data.
• Image (codenamed “Glance”) provides a catalog and repository for virtual disk images. These disk images are mostly commonly used in OpenStack Compute. While this service is technically optional, any cloud of size will require it.
• Compute (codenamed “Nova”) provides virtual servers upon demand. Rackspace and HP provide commercial compute services built on Nova and it is used internally at companies like Mercado Libre and NASA (where it originated).
• Dashboard (codenamed “Horizon”) provides a modular web-based user interface for all the OpenStack services. With this web GUI, you can perform most operations on your cloud like launching an instance, assigning IP addresses and setting access controls.
• Identity (codenamed “Keystone”) provides authentication and authorization for all the OpenStack services. It also provides a service catalog of services within a particular OpenStack cloud.
• Network (codenamed “Quantum”) provides “network connectivity as a service” between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services (most likely Nova). The service works by allowing users to create their own networks and then attach interfaces to them. Quantum has a pluggable architecture to support many popular networking vendors and technologies.
• Block Storage (codenamed “Cinder”) provides persistent block storage to guest VMs. This project was born from code originally in Nova (the nova-volume service described below). In the Folsom release, both the nova-volume service and the separate volume service are available.

OpenStack can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be with end users who can interact through a common web interface or directly to each service through their API while all services are authenticated via a common source. Other individual services interact with each other through their public APIs.

OpenStack is a framework that in and of itself does not provide for the primary compute functions of a hypervisor. Currently most development is done on KVM and Xen based hypervisors. To see more on this go to http://wiki.openstack.org/HypervisorSupportMatrix. I have been using Xen server with some work done on ESXi.

Open Stack compute consists of several primary components as listed below:

• API Server
  • Works as the web service front end for the cloud controller
• Compute controller
  • Provides compute server resource and usually contains the compute service
• Object Store
  • Optionally provides storage service
• Authentication Manager
  • Used for authentication and authorization services when used for Compute systems
• Identity Service (keystone)
  • Can also work like the auth manager to provide a separate authentication service
• Volume controller
  • Allows for fast permanent block-level storage for the compute servers
• Network Controller
  • Allows for virtual networks to enable compute servers to interact with each other and with a public network
• Scheduler
  • Selects the suitable compute controller to host an instance

The next topic will be the discussion of Shared storage or Cloud storage and How OpenStack helps and augments the deployment of these technologies.

With the past behind me it’s time to start contributing to new ideas and reporting on cool new technology in the storage world. It is always good to see outside contributions either to posts or coming up with your own topics. Everyone gets author status so you can start posting as soon as you sign up but be warned I will remove your author status if I see abuse or topics that are not relevant to the Storagexpert.com site. Let’s keep it storage, keep it clean, and keep it interesting. I am thinking of a few topics now like active active datacenters and DR protection for these new solutions. Also what’s new in storage today is a track that I will build on weekly basis.

I hope everyone enjoys the new information that I will be posting and happy reading!

Thank you and as always keep the response times low!
Storagexpert