1. OpenStack Overview
By Thomas GOIRAND
(GPLHost CEO and Debian Developer)
Presentation released under the therms of the BSD license, made for the Shanghai OpenStack conference of the 6 th of September 2011
thomas@gplhost.com / zigo@debian.org

2. Overview
● Who am I, GPLHost in few words
● Overview of all the 4 projects:
● Nova
● Packages overview
● Dependency overview
● High Availability setup
● Using Nova: euca2ools
● Swift: general principles and overview
● Glance & Keystone quick overview
● Nova and Xen-api: quick packaging status update

3. Who is Thomas Goirand?
● Debian Developer, 35 years old
● CEO and founder of GPLHost
● Main author of GPLHost hosting software
● French guy living in Shanghai since 2006
● Background:
● Embedded (Palm, Windows CE, Navigation)
● Assembly 68k, PHP, Shell, Python, C/C++
● Linux administration in general

4. GPLHost in few words
● Open source applied to hosting:
● Since 2003
● XEN VPS since 2005
● DTC control panel
● Fast development:
● Support around the world
● 10 points of presence
● 3 companies (UK, SG, US)
● A unique software & hosting company:
● Open source software for hosting
companies
● Development directly in Debian

5. Openstack in the world
● Many companies using and contributing to it
● Fully open source (Apache license)
● Open governance: we decide the design collectively
● In China:
● mostly experiments, no service providers yet, not a
lot of contributors or participant in the main
OpenStack list
● A lot of people interested
● Government pushing for cloud computing
● To sum up: a bright future in mainland, just like
everywhere else

6. 4 projects
● Nova: Compute, the core project of OpenStack
● Swift: Storage
● Glance: OS Image storage, using swift
●Keystone: unified authentification for the 3 projects
above
● Many “side” projects (not covered today)
● Load balancing with Atlas
● Clanavi
● Dashboard
● CaaS
● Etc. (see http://www.openstack.org/projects/)

7. Nova (OpenStack Compute)
● A very young project (1 year old)
● Released every 6 months, with Ubuntu
● Responsible for maintaining your VM instances
● Start / stop
● Assign IPs and provide network

8. Nova: package lists/services
● Compute: start / stop VMs
● Network: assigns IP addresses (DHCP), routes all
VMs IP traffic through bridge
● Scheduler: performs live migrations between nova-
compute nodes, decides where to accommodate an
instance
● Volume: elastic, persistent storage for your VMs
(RAID is advised)
● Instance-monitor: operational reports of running VMs
● Object store: basic operating system images storage
● ajax-console-proxy

9. Nova: dependencies
● RabitMQ: message routing between services (will be
reimplemented in the future)
● MySQL server:
● Storage for nova-network and others
● Euca2ools: ec2 clients for using OpenStack
● Memcached: caching proxy for nova, speeds up
requests
● KVM, Xen/Xen-server, VMWare, LXC, and others:
virtualization layer
● Kpart / parted: online partitioning for instances
● Really A LOT of python modules (more than 20
python build-dependencies in Cactus)

10. Normal setup overview
Openstack runtime Schema courtesy of Dell

11. HA setup 1/2
● OpenStack = no single point of failure
●RabitMQ: HA setup with heartbeat or pacemaker &
DRDB http://www.rabbitmq.com/pacemaker.html
● Right now if a message is lost, it seems the
DB/other nodes are left in a bad state
● no “reaper” python object that will reap this bad
data/instances...
●MySQL: 2 nodes, DRDB of /var/lib/mysql with
pacemaker or heartbeat for fail over
● Memcached: you can setup more than one instance

12. HA setup 2/2
●Nova-compute = disposable hardware, hard to make
HA, but can be thought as disposable
● Nova-network:
● The less easy part
● Active/Standby with Linux-HA and keepalived or
● One nova-network per nova-compute node
●Nova-api: multiple instance, then 2xHAProxy with
heartbeat
● MySQL: master/slave setup, or DRDB of
/var/lib/mysql with pacemaker

13. Once it's setup: using nova
● Client: euca2ools, mainly ec2 compatible
● euca-describe-images
● euca-run-instance
● euca-attach-volume
● etc.
● Dashboard: just another OpenStack client
● Start / stop instances
● Attach volumes
● Nova-manage: a shell tool to manage access rights
● Users
● Projects
● Instances

14. The still missing bits
● Provider API, to remote control Nova
● Eriksson working on OCCI implementation, soon to
be released
● Automatic billing, invoicing and accounting

15. Swift: general principles
● 3 elements:
● Users
● Projects
● Objects
● Multiple servers synching each others using rsync
● Each object replicated N times (N configurable)
● Not a filesystem: object storage
●Not designed to be fast, but for a large amount of
objects (billions) and scalability

16. Swift: overview
● Do not install nodes with RAID: swift has redundancy
● Smallest setup: 5 nodes, 3 replicas
● Replication: everything 3 times (or more)
● One ring in /etc/swift/ring* shared among all nodes
● A swift-proxy as a user access (like for Nova)
● Swift is a mature and stable project

17. Glance
● Uses Swift as a storage back-end
● Provides VMs images for nova-compute
Keystone
● New project in OpenStack (in Diablo only)
●Previously, Nova, Swift, with different authentication
schemes: the “pam of OpenStack”
● Unifies auth for the 4 projects, and make it modular

18. Xen in Nova: development status
● Xen status in Linux
● Xen support in Ubuntu and Debian
● Xen support in Nova
● Currently using Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) or
XenServer
●Ongoing effort to transform XCP into packages:
project Kronos
● Modification of Xen 4.1.1 in Debian
● Packaging of blktap + blktap-ko
● Packaging of xen-api-libs and xen-api