Today we are launching our company blog, focused on open source infrastructure computing. We plan to cover various emerging technologies and market paradigms related to this segment of IT. As you might imagine, we did not choose this topic by accident. Aside from being the focus for our blog, it is also the focus of [...]

Overview In this article, we discuss our approach to performing an Openstack installation on Fedora using our RPM repository and Kickstart. When we first started working with OpenStack, we found that the most popular platform for deploying OpenStack was Ubuntu, which seemed like a viable option for us, as there are packages for it available, [...]

Storage is a tricky part of the cloud environment. We want it to be fast, to be network-accessible and to be as reliable as possible. One way is to go to the shop and buy yourself a SAN solution from a prominent vendor for solid money. Another way is to take commodity hardware and use [...]

Our current integration task involves using goSA as the central management utility. goSA internally uses the LDAP repository for all of its data. So we had to find a solution to make both OpenStack Nova and Dashboard authenticate and authorize users using goSA’s LDAP structures. LDAP in Nova Nova stores its users, projects and roles [...]

Today, I want to take a look at some possible issues that may be encountered while using OpenStack. The purpose of this topic is to share our experience dealing with the hardware or software failures which definitely would be faced by anyone who attempts to run OpenStack in production.

Software issue
Let’s look at the simplest, but possibly the most frequent issue. For example, if we need to upgrade the kernel or software that will require a host reboot on one of the compute nodes, the best decision in this case is to migrate all virtual machines running on this server to other compute nodes. Unfortunately, sometimes it may be impossible due to several reasons, such as lack of shared storage to perform migration or cpu/memory resources to allocate all VMs. The only option is to shut down virtual machines for the maintenance period. But how should they be started correctly after being rebooted? Of course, you may set the special flag in nova.conf and instances will start automatically on the host system boot:

As Florian Haas has pointed out in my previous post’s comment, our shared storage configuration requires special precautions to avoid corruption of data when two hosts connected via DRBD try to manage LVM volumes simultaneously. Generally, these precautions concern locking LVM metadata operations while running DRBD in ‘dual-primary’ mode. Let’s examine it in detail. The [...]

A couple of months ago, Chris Marino, CEO at vCider, stopped by the Mirantis office and gave a very interesting presentation on the vCider networking solution for clouds. A few days later, he kindly provided me with beta access to their product. A few days ago, vCider announced public availability of the product. So now [...]

For those of you that weren’t able to make it yesterday and maybe for those of you who want to reminisce about the events of last night, Bay Area OpenStack Meet & Drink was probably the most well-attended OpenStack meetup in the valley to date, outside of the OpenStack summit this spring. A diverse crowd [...]

After some time working with OpenStack installation using existing LDAP installation for authentication, we encountered one big problem. The latest Dashboard code dropped support of old bare authentication in favor of Keystone-based one. That time Keystone had no support for multiple authentication backends, so we had to develop this feature. Now we have a basic [...]

Here are the highlights on our corporate team-building in Vegas last week. Special thanks to Rachel and Athena for making this party happen. Thank you to all who participated and helped make it fun. We started by warming up with some drinks in the airport bar on the way over to Vegas. The luggage belt [...]