Icehouse Summit in Atlanta. Joint presentation with Scott Lowe, from VMware.

1. OpenStack for VMware administrators in the
context of a fictional use case
Bridging the Gap

2. #rackstackatl
Presenters
Kenneth Hui
Technology Evangelist
Rackspace
Twitter: @hui_kenneth
Scott Lowe
Engineering Architect
VMware, Inc.
Twitter: @scott_lowe

3. #rackstackatl
Agenda

4. #rackstackatl
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

5. #rackstackatl
A tale of two workloads

6. #rackstackatl
Workload dictates architecture

7. #rackstackatl
Traditional design principles
Monolithic architecture
Stateful Services
Operator focused

8. #rackstackatl
Design goal: Resilient infrastructures

9. #rackstackatl
Cloud-native design principles
Distributed architecture
Developer focused
Stateless Services

10. #rackstackatl
Design assumption: Fragile infrastructures

11. #rackstackatl
We architect clouds for rapid scale
1

12. #rackstackatl
Chaos and failures are inevitable at scale
1

13. #rackstackatl
So design for failure
1

14. #rackstackatl
• 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

15. #rackstackatl
Fictitious customer use case

16. #rackstackatl
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

17. #rackstackatl
Proposed solution

18. #rackstackatl
18
Multi-hypervisor OpenStack architecture

19. #rackstackatl
vSphere in OpenStack

20. #rackstackatl
Workload zones
Cloud Controller Cloud Controller
ESXi
ESXi VMs
+N
Oracle Host
Aggregate
vCenter
ESXi
ESXi VMs
Compute Node
+N
Compute Node/KVM
KVM VMs
App Host
Aggregate
+N
KVM Host
Aggregate
Virtual Computer Node

21. #rackstackatl
• 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
Networking
Physical 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)

22. #rackstackatl
vSphere storage in OpenStack
vCenter
ESXi
ESXI VMs
ESXi
ESXI VMs
Compute Node
Virtual Computer Node
Cloud Controller
Cinder Node

23. #rackstackatl
• 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

24. #rackstackatl
Summary

25. #rackstackatl
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

26. #rackstackatl
Questions?

27. #rackstackatl
THANK YOU!
Ken Hui
ken.hui@rackspace.com
Scott Lowe
slowe@vmware.com