Xlcloud Presentation by Sylvain Bauza, Bull. Abstract: XLcloud is a three-year long collaborative project funded by the French FSN (Fonds national pour la Société Numérique) programme, call Cloud n° 1, that was initially submitted under the name "Magellan". XLcloud strives to establish the demonstration of a High Performance Cloud Computing (HPCC) platform based on OpenStack that is designed to run a representative set of compute intensive workloads including more specifically interactive games, interactive simulations and 3D graphic applications. In this context, provisioning a full stack from baremetal nodes to running PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) implies many challenges that XLCloud team has to deal with day-to-day. The goal of this talk is to discuss about the current state-of-art on how to deploy and configure Openstack, how these tools can help XLCloud to match its needs and the current status of the project by itself.

1. 2013/11/14
Provisioning the Cloud within XLCloud
Sylvain Bauza

2. Slide 2/14
XLcloud project
http://xlcloud.org/
A three-year long collaborative project
Funded by the French FSN (Fonds national pour la Société
Numérique) programme, started early 2012
Apache 2.0 license
Members
● Bull
● Institut Telecom (Telecom Sud Paris)
● Silkan
● CEA List
● EISTI
● ATEME
● OW2
● Inria RESO

3. Slide 3/14
Mission statement of XLcloud
The XLcloud project strives to establish the demonstration
of a High Performance Cloud Computing (HPCC)
platform based on OpenStack that is designed to run a
representative set of compute intensive workloads
including more specifically interactive games, interactive
simulations and 3D graphic applications.

4. Slide 4/14
Common HPCC issues
Issues
● Virtualization overhead (5% to 30%)
especially for I/O
● Large data volume transfers
● Low latency / high bandwidth networks
● Lack of mature management,
orchestration and monitoring features
● Security concerns (data privacy,
authorization)
Solutions
● HVM, LXC, bare-metal instances
● GPU support for compute and graphics
● High performance full-bisection network with
traffic control
● GUI & REST API (XMS) to manage and
monitor full software stacks
● Strong and standard AuthN / AuthZ
protocols
● Instances can be allocated on reserved,
dedicated and homogeneous HW with CPU
affinity

5. Slide 5/14
XLcloud interactions with OpenStack
Designed for DevOps minded users
to create and manage the life-cycle
of multi-tier middleware stacks
Vertically integrated with the
OpenStack CMS and physical infra
Advanced Identity & Access
Management integration

6. Slide 6/14
Walkthrough of stack creation

7. Slide 7/14
Deploying Openstack on baremetal
A three-step process:
Installing the OS
Installing the packages
Configuring Openstack
Various solutions :
MaaS/JuJu : Canonical
Crowbar : Suse
TripleO : Openstack On Openstack (official program, HP/RedHat)
Others...

8. Slide 8/14
Foreman and Puppet
Foreman
Lifecycle management tool with “Smart Proxies”
Support of pre-seed (Ubuntu), Kickstart (RHEL) config files
Puppet SmartProxy : Puppet External Node Classifier (ENC)
Puppet manifests for Openstack
Stackforge projects, one per Openstack project
Librarian-puppet for managing dependencies
Definition of HostGroups and SmartVariables for managing
configuration of our clusters

9. Slide 9/14
Foreman : hosts view

10. Slide 10/14
Foreman : Puppet integration

11. Slide 11/14
Provisioning the stack
Heat : should I present ?
Userdata usage with cfn-tools
Chef recipes
Chef-solo only
Synchronization/communication thanks to MCollective
Climate : A resource reservation service (0.1 by December)
Implements lease management
Plans to implement both virtual and physical resources (Vms, stacks,
compute hosts...)
TBD : Marconi for notifications, HOT software templates ?

12. Slide 12/14
XLcloud contributions to OpenStack
Puppet for Openstack
Climate project
Heat
Ceilometer (KWAPI)
Nova (CPU affinity, GPU)
Neutron (Infiniband)

13. Slide 13/14
How to contribute to OpenStack ?
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute
Very dynamic community with many skilled and creative people
Mailing lists and IRC channels are really important to learn, build
relationships and credibility
Don't wait for features to land, be proactive and show that you care
Test new features
Report bugs
Write documentation
Fix bugs

14. Thank you. Any questions ?