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Deploying SwiftStack Object Storage

for VMware Integrated OpenStack

April 2015

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Important Notes

Step-by-Step Details

Step 1: Register for the SwiftStack Management Service

Step 2: Create Your SwiftStack Nodes

Step 3: Configure Your SwiftStack Cluster

Step 4: Put Your First Data into SwiftStack!

Step 5: Connect SwiftStack to VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO)

Step 6: Configure OpenStack Glance to Use SwiftStack Object Storage

Appendix

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Introduction

For VMware customers, VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) provides a simple and fast way to allow software

development teams to innovate using the industry-standard OpenStack API on top of their existing vSphere

infrastructure. One critical component of OpenStack is Swift object storage, and SwiftStack provides simple-

to-deploy, simple-to-manage, and simple-to-monitor management software for OpenStack Swift (you might

say, SwiftStack makes Swift enterprise-ready). Together, VMware and SwiftStack provide an easy way to

enable OpenStack Swift object storage VIO deployments on top of vSphere infrastructure.

As with most OpenStack deployments, SwiftStack object storage is typically used in three ways in VMware

Integrated OpenStack deployments:

1. Glance virtual machine images: The OpenStack Glance service can store its virtual machine image files

in Swift object storage.

2. Cinder volume backups: The OpenStack Cinder service can be configured to backup its block storage

volumes to Swift object storage.

3. Native application storage: With the exponentially increasing growth of unstructured data, modern

application developers are rapidly developing against the Swift API to give their applications access to

massively scalable and geographically distributed Swift object storage systems.

This document describes the steps necessary to deploy SwiftStack and integrate it with the Keystone

authentication service in VMware Integrated OpenStack. It is assumed that VIO is already deployed. (For help

with VIO, please see VMwares documentation.) For additional details about integrating SwiftStack with

OpenStack Glance and Cinder backup services, refer to the OpenStack intgeration information on

http://swiftstack.com/partners.

Important Notes A SwiftStack deployment as described in this document is specifically intended for development and testing

environmentsnot for production scenarios. Production SwiftStack deployments are capable of scaling to

span multiple continents and include thousands of nodes and exabytes of usable storage capacity. At this

scaleand even at smaller scaleproduction SwiftStack systems are deployed on bare metal hardware with

direct access to individual spinning drives and/or solid state drives, and Swifts availability and data

protection capabilities have been proven at scale many times overin both private and public clouds alike.

SwiftStack will support VIO users deploying three-node Swift clusters in ESX according to this document and

containing up to 10TB of unique data in test and development workloads. If you are interested in SwiftStack

http://swiftstack.com/partners

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for a production environment or an environment containing more than 10TB of unique data, please email

contact@swiftstack.com.

Step-by-Step Details

Step 1: Register for the SwiftStack Management Service The following steps will guide you to register for an account on the SwiftStack Management Service, add an

administrative user to manage the account, and create your SwiftStack cluster. Subsequent steps will guide

you through adding nodes to that cluster and using it.

1. Register at swiftstack.com for an account on the SwiftStack Management Service.

a. Start at https://swiftstack.com/customer/signup/

Make sure you read and accept the terms of service and continue to the Invite Administrator menu:

mailto:contact@swiftstack.comhttps://swiftstack.com/customer/signup/https://swiftstack.com/customer/signup/

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Click on Agree and Start Trial to continue to the menu where you can choose the administrator credentials for the person you want to invite (for test purposes this could be the same person that has created the initial SwiftStack account). An email will be sent to the mail address you filled in. Open the email, and follow the link provided. You will be directed to the login page for the SwiftStack Controller:

b. After successful registration, login to the SwiftStack controller using the administrative

credentials you created earlier, and create a cluster in your SwiftStack Management Service account.

2. Create your first cluster

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a. Login to your SwiftStack controller account.

b. At the following menu you can set the cluster, credentials. Most important is the Network Configuration part. You will need to fill in the IP address, andif your setup requires itthe fully qualified domain name for the SwiftStack API interface (see next chapter for DNS information used in this tutorial). When the cluster is operational and all nodes are deployed, you can change the IP address and/or the FQDN here. The default setup will use a SwiftStack Virtual Load Balancer to assign the IP address to the cluster. Be aware that you should not have another load balancer or similar system in the same subnet as your cluster (and the nodes).

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After you have completed the form, click Submit Changes.

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c. Now you are ready to start deploying your nodes:

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Step 2: Create Your SwiftStack Nodes

The following steps will guide you through downloading a pre-built VMware appliance OVA, which is

essentially an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine, importing it into ESX, and installing the SwiftStack software. (In a

production environment, instead of importing an OVA into your ESX infrastructure, you would install real Linux

servers and then follow the same subsequent steps to install SwiftStack and include those nodes in your

SwiftStack cluster.)

1. Download the VMWare Swiftstack OVA

a. Preparation: Make sure you have IP addresses reserved and have operational forward and

reverse DNS lookup zone records in the DNS server you are using. In the examples below, the

following forward lookup records have been setup and used for zone example.com:

swiftstackapi A 10.0.0.60

node01 A 10.0.0.61

node02 A 10.0.0.62

node03 A 10.0.0.63

The following reverse lookup records for zone 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa:

60 PTR swiftstackapi.example.com.

61 PTR node01.example.com.

62 PTR node02.example.com.

63 PTR node03.example.com.

b. Download the SwiftStack VMWare image (in OVA format) from https://files.swiftstack.com/SwiftStack_node_image.ova. (To confirm the accuracy of your download, compare your MD5 checksum to that in https://files.swiftstack.com/SwiftStack_node_image.md5.) To create a small SwiftStack cluster, the image needs to be deployed three times. We recommend to download the image once, store it on local storage, and deploy from there to your VMWare data center cluster.

https://files.swiftstack.com/SwiftStack_node_image.ovahttps://files.swiftstack.com/SwiftStack_node_image.md5

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c. Login to the VMWare vSphere Web Client using an account with enough rights to deploy and

start virtual machines:

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d. Navigate to the vCenter -> vSphere -> VMs and Templates Inventory view:

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e. Right click on the vSphere or data center name and choose Deploy OVF Template:

f. Choose Local file and navigate to the location where you have downloaded the

SwiftStack node image using the Browse button:

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g. Type a unique name to identify the new virtual machine:

h. Choose a datacenter cluster or a specific ESXi host to deploy the image:

i. Choose a data store; consider that the performance of SwiftStack depends on network connectivity, compute resources in its nodes, and the disks where data is stored, so choosing a

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higher-performing data store here will result in higher-performing SwiftStack as well:

j. Choose the network that will be attached to the new image. Eventually, the SwiftStack cluster nodes need to be configured inside the same network as the VMWare Integrated OpenStack management servers. This can be changed later, but it is important at this stage that you choose a source network that can reach the Internet and your local DNS servers.

k. Review the settings for the new virtual machine, and make any corrections if necessary:

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l. Keep an eye on the recent tasks status, and make sure deployment of template succeeds:

m. Start the OVA image, and open a vSphere console. The very first time the image boots it will ask for network configuration information. Please answer the questions carefully with the values available for your organization. In the following screenshot, the IP addresses from the example above are used:

n. Answer y (and press enter) at the Reboot now? prompt to allow the system to reboot.

3. Install the SwiftStack software in your first virtual node in ESX.

a. You may want to connect to the ne