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

Bridging the Gap

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Presenters

Kenneth Hui

Technology Evangelist

Rackspace

Twitter: @hui_kenneth

Scott Lowe

Engineering Architect

VMware, 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 focused

Stateless 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

12

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So design for failure

13

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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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18

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)

Logical Network(131.107.2.x/24)

Logical Network(192.168.1.x/24)

Logical Network(192.168.1.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 Huiken.hui@rackspace.com

Scott Loweslowe@vmware.com