OpenStack and Cumulus Linux: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

By Unknown - 4:44 PM

OpenStack is a very popular open source technology stack used to  build private and public cloud computing platforms. It powers clouds for  thousands of companies like Yahoo!, Dreamhost, Rackspace, eBay, and  many more.

Why drives its popularity? Being open source, it puts cloud builders  in charge of their own destiny, whether they choose to work with a  partner, or deploy it themselves. Because it is Linux based, it is  highly amenable to automation, whether you’re building out your network  or are running it in production. At build time, it’s great for  provisioning, installing and configuring the physical resources. In  production, it’s just as effective, since provisioning tenants, users,  VMs, virtual networks and storage is done via self-service Web  interfaces or automatable APIs. Finally, it’s always been designed to  run well on commodity servers, avoiding reliance on proprietary vendor  features.
Cumulus Linux fits naturally into an OpenStack cloud, because it  shares a similar design and philosophy. Built on open source, Cumulus  Linux is Linux, allowing common management, monitoring and  configuration on both servers and switches. The same automation and  provisioning tools that you commonly use for OpenStack servers you can  also use unmodified on Cumulus Linux switches, giving a single  pane of glass for automation and monitoring. And Cumulus Linux runs on a  wide variety of hardware from 5 different hardware manufacturers, so  you can utilize the same multi-vendor, commodity approach to procure  your network that you do for your server hardware.
The Cumulus Linux OpenStack Validated Solution Guide will show you  how to build OpenStack clouds ranging from a simple, single rack proof  of concept to a full, scalable data center cloud environment. Installing  and configuring both the network and the servers is fully automated;  once the servers and switches are racked and cabled, simply insert a USB  drive with the Cumulus Linux installer image into one of the switches,  and power on the cluster. The switches will install Cumulus Linux using ONIE,  then configure themselves using zero touch provisioning (ZTP). The  switches then PXE install Linux onto the servers, and use Puppet to  install and configure the various OpenStack components, such as Nova,  Nova-net, Glance, Cinder, Keystone and Horizon. In mere minutes after  powering on the cluster, you’ll be starting VMs on your new OpenStack  cloud!

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