Wido den Hollander from Your.Online discusses how the company maximizes the lifespan of its hardware to reduce environmental impact. It uses Apache CloudStack to tag hosts by generation and direct workloads to the appropriate tier, allowing older hardware to still be utilized. Live migrations are enabled by configuring CPU profiles in KVM. Ceph storage clusters can also leverage refurbished hardware. Tracking metrics like kWh consumption of CloudStack deployments could provide further insight into environmental impact.

1. 12
Q4 2023
Public
Your Ground to Build Online Possibilities
Re-using old hardware with CloudStack
It benefits your wallet and the environment

2. Page 2
Who am I?
Your.Online
Wido den Hollander
Netherlands
• 1986
• Married
• Father of two sons (2020 & 2022)
Active in the hosting industry since 2003
• Started my own hosting company in 2004
• Joined TWS (now Your.Online) in 2018
CTO of Your.Online
Open Source, CloudStack, Ceph and IPv6 enthousiast

3. Page 3
Who is Your.Online?
Your.Online
Your Ground to Build Online Possibilities
• In the online business, mainly webhosting (holding, private)
• Started in the Netherlands, now also active in France and
Spain
• EUR 175m revenue, 1 million customers, 600 employees
• Some of our brands: Gandi, Savvii, Yourhosting, Versio,
Axarnet, Nexylan, o2switch, ShockMedia
• Our brands use a lot of Open Source software
• Large CloudStack deployments
• Large number of Ceph clusters

4. Page 4
CloudStack @ Your.Online
Your.Online
Large parts of our infrastrure are powered by Apache CloudStack
• Netherlands
• Amsterdam
• Haarlem
• Spain
• Valencia
Hunderds of hypervisors hosting thousands of virtual machines

5. Page 5
Environment
Your.Online
We don’t like throwing away properly function hardware
That would be a waste of money and bad for the environment
We care about both

6. Page 6
Replace your servers every 5 years!
Your.Online
• Yes! That’s what vendors have been telling you for
years! (No, they aren’t!)
• 5y means they operate for about 4 years
• 6 months from delivery to production
• 6 months before their EOL you need to start
replacement
After 5y servers are old, right?

7. Page 7
Measuring environmental impact: GWP, CO2e and PCF
Your.Online
Global Warming Potential
(GWP)
A common scale to measure
the climate effects of different
gasses over a specified
period.
This is the expression of the
physical quantity of the
climate effects of a
greenhouse gas.
“Speed”
Carbon dioxide
equivalent (CO2e)
A common unit for quantifying
a measurement of GWP.
The measurement is
expressed in kg Carbon
dioxide equivalent of a
greenhouse gas.
“km/h”
Product Carbon Footprint
(PCF)
The most established method
for determining the climate
impact of a products full
lifecycle.
Ultimately expressed in CO2e.

8. Page 8
What is the 4 year PCF of a server?
Your.Online
Running time: 4 years
Operational: 24/7
GWP 100 years in CO2e: 8,617 kg
x12 32GB DIMM
x1 400GB SSD
x8 3.4TB SSD
x2 Intel Xeon 140W
CPU’s 2U, 2-socket
platform
Source Dell LCA of PowerEdge R740

9. Page 9
Life Cycle Assessment of a Dell server
Your.Online

10. Page 10
How to maximize your influence on PCF
Your.Online
4 Year cycle 5 Year cycle 6 Year cycle 7 Year cycle
No influence
Influence
64%
36%
61%
39%
54%
44%
50%
50%

11. Page 11
So what is the 50% manufacturing impact made up of?
Your.Online
4 Year cycle
No influence
Influence 50%
50%
50%
80%
SSD

12. Page 12
The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon
Your.Online
“Scalable Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have ushered in a
transformative era in data storage and accessibility,
spanning both data centers and portable devices.
However, the strides made in scaling this technology can
bear significant environmental consequences. On a
global scale, a notable portion of semiconductor
manufacturing relies on electricity derived from coal and
natural gas sources. A striking example of this is the
manufacturing process for a single Gigabyte of Flash
memory, which emits approximately 0.16 Kg of CO2.”
Source: The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon (October 2023)
SWAMIT TANNU, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
PRASHANT J. NAIR, University of British Columbia, Canada

13. Page 13
CO2 emissions from electricity production
Your.Online

14. Page 14
Buy refurbished! and keep using old(er) hardware!
Your.Online
From personal experience these often work better
because the software has been battle-tested
You save 50% on CO2e due to the lack of manufacturing
Significant lower CAPEX compared to buying new servers
• Reduction can be up to 50%, typically 30%
Using refurbished servers is a no-go, right?

15. Page 15
Uh, CloudStack?
Your.Online
What does this have to do with CloudStack?
We’re at a CloudStack conference, tell us something about CloudStack!
Hint: Tagging and service offerings!

16. Page 16
Host Tagging & Service Offerings
Your.Online
Tag your hosts and target them with Service Offerings
This way you can create different categories based on
performance characteristics of servers

17. Page 17
Generations of hardware
Your.Online
Due to the acquisitions, we do we have many generations of hardware
• Intel Xeon
• E5: Broadwell & Haswell
• Scalable: Skylake & Cascade Lake
• AMD Epyc
• Gen 1: Naples
• Gen 2: Rome

18. Page 18
Tiers & Service Offerings
Your.Online
Offering Hardware Host Tags
Tier 1 Latest generation hardware t1
Tier 1a AMD Epyc t1,t1a
Tier 1b Intel Xeon Scalable t1,t1b
Tier 2 Previous generation hardware t2
Tier 2a Intel Xeon E5 v4 t2,t2a
Tier 3 Older generations hardware t3
Tier 3a Intel Xeon E5 v3 t3,t3a
Tier 3b Intel Xeon E5 v2 t3,t3b

19. Page 19
T1 Performance Service Offerings
Your.Online
T1 Performance Service Offerings
Targets hosts with the tag ‘t1’
Thus, the VM can and up running on a host with an
AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon Scalable CPU

20. Page 20
How do we use it?
Your.Online
Not all applications require the latest hardware
High performance websites (e-commerce) run on Tier 1 hosts
We try to use hardware as long as possible
Spamfilters run on Tier 2 and Tier 3
Many backoffice applications run on Tier 2 hosts

21. Page 21
(Live) migrations
Your.Online
What about live migrations?
We make sure the same types of hardware share the same cluster
A rack of hardware is a cluster in our case
Rack Hardware Tier # Power (kW)
138-A05 SuperMicro 1U with Dual AMD Epyc Gen 1 t1 11 5
138-A13 SuperMicro 1U with Dual Xeon E5 v4 t2 11 5
138-A15 Dell R6515 with Single AMD Epyc Gen 2 t1 18 5
138-B15 Dell R6515 with Single AMD Epyc Gen 2 t1 18 5
138-E14 SuperMicro 1U with Dual AMD Epyc Gen 2 t1 11 5
138-F13 SuperMicro 2U-Twin (4 nodes, 2U) with Dual Xeon E5 v4 t2 3 (12) 5
138-F14 Dell R630 with Dual Xeon E5 v3 t3 17 5
138-F15 Dell R630 with Dual Xeon E5 v4 t2 17 5
Amsterdam (AMS02) datacenter

22. Page 22
Libvirt CPU profile
Your.Online
Configure the CloudStack KVM Agent
guest.cpu.mode=custom
guest.cpu.model=EPYC-IBPB
hypervisor.type=kvm
Set the right CPU model in the KVM Agent so live migrations work as expected
/etc/cloudstack/agent/agent.properties
guest.cpu.mode=custom
guest.cpu.model=Broadwell-IBRS
hypervisor.type=kvm

23. Page 23
Rack of hypervisors
Your.Online

24. Page 24
Storage
Your.Online
Ceph
Ceph is designed for failure
Why not use refurbished hardware for a Ceph environment?
Does everything require top-notch performance?
Why wouldn’t you run a Ceph cluster with SATA based SSDs for your backend workload?

25. Page 25
Summary
Your.Online
Summary
Hardware production has a significant impact on the environment
Please think twice before replacing hardware
Use Host Tags with Service Offerings to run your applications on the right hardware
Older hardware can still be used

26. Page 26
One more thing
Your.Online
How much kWh does CloudStack consume?
Do we know how much kWh a single Trillian run consumes?
Can we find out or make an educated guess?
A Blue Orang Utan run?

27. Page 27
Thanks
Your.Online
Thank you!
Wido den Hollander
w.denhollander@your.online / wido@denhollander.io
@widodh