Mirantis OpenStack(MOS) is a hardened OpenStack distribution with the Fuel deployment orchestrator. It uses PXE boot to setup other nodes in the OpenStack Cloud, thus making it very easy to quickly setup a multi-node OpenStack environment. Most traditional Mirantis OpenStack deployments are done on bare metal where there is support for PXE, full access to layer 2 networking, hardware acceleration support, etc. However, that requires capex investment in physical hardware and longer lead time to get everything provisioned. I approached Ravello to leverage their technology to setup Mirantis OpenStack on public cloud, so I could overcome these challenges and it’s been great to partner with them.
With Ravello nested hypervisor platform, I was able to:
- Install hardware accelerated hypervisors such as KVM. This allows OpenStack guests to run at full speed even though the hypervisors run on already virtualization hardware.
- Implement private tenant networks using VLANs offering full Layer-2 access to the guests while at the same time giving full separation.
- Implement network booting(PXE) to leverage the Mirantis OpenStack Fuel deployment process.
I was able setup a 3 Compute node with Cinder, 1 Controller and 1 Zabbix system (monitoring system, as part of Mirantis OpenStack) environment with Fuel deployment on AWS and Google Cloud. This setup also comprised of multiple logical networks - admin, management, fixed/private, public/floating. Check out my detailed, how-to blog post here: http://www.cloudops.com/2015/05/faking-bare-metal-in-the-cloud-with-ravello-systems. I saved my multi-node Mirantis OpenStack application as a blueprint in my private library on Ravello. So, now I can spin up multiple isolated instances of the entire Mirantis OpenStack environments from the blueprint on AWS and Google Cloud, when required - on demand. There is no lead time spent to start from scratch and configure physical hardware, install various software components. These environments can be run for as long as required and shut down to be later spun up for use in the future.
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