Recently an announcement was made that took a lot of people by surprise. Canonical and Microsoft announced that Ubuntu was now able to run on the Windows desktop.
Dustin Kirkland was the main man on the Canonical side who drove this. I caught up with Dustin at the OpenStack summit to learn more about this seemingly strange move by Microsoft.
Take a listen
Some of the ground Dustin covers
Ubuntu and Azure and the Microsoft partnership
Microsoft approached Canonical about bringing Ubuntu to the Windows desktop (looking to attract developers using Linux)
The Microsoft kernel team has built the Windows subsystem for Linux – Translates Linux systems calls to Windows system calls – Canonical asked to deliver the userspace
When users type bash they end up in an environment which is essentially Ubuntu minus the kernel
What have been the reactions to this move from the various constituents
Yesterday here at the OpenStack summit here in Austin I caught a few of the sessions in the track that Canonical was hosting. One of the sessions dealt with Canonical’s LXD and where it fits into the whole virtualization/container space.
The talk was given by Dustin Kirkland and after he had finished, I grabbed him to explain the basics of LXD and the landscape it fits within.
Have a listen
Some of the ground Dustin covers:
What is LXD and how is it different from virtual machines and containers
How LXD acts like a hypervisor but is fundamentally a container
Application containers vs Machine containers
Applications containers like Docker host a single proccess on a filesystem
Machine containers from LXD boot a full OS on their filesystems
Yesterday the OpenStack summit kicked off here in Austin, TX. This week’s event is being attended by 7,500 individuals.
To give some perspective on the project’s growth, at the inaugural design summit back in 2010 there were 75 people in attendance. The purpose of this initial invite-only event was to “develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.”
Since that time the project has been spun out of Rackspace and has become an independent foundation and today “Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day.”
Thoughts from day zero
To give you a feel for the project’s origins and what it’s aspirations were at that time, below is a set of interviews conducted at the event with some of the key players.
This first one, which does a good job of setting the stage, is an interview with the initial architect/project lead for OpenStack compute, Rick Clark.
The project has come quite a way since the initial meeting back in 2010 at the Omni hotel here in Austin. It will be interesting to see where it is six years from now.
The week before last I was roaming the expo floor at Dell World and I bumped into Steve Croce. Steve is at Dell and is the product manager and strategist for our OpenStack private cloud offering.
I got Steve to spend a few minutes with me and give me the lowdown on what we are offering and where Red Hat plays in. Take a listen.
Some of the ground Steve covers
Who’s Dell targeting with our offering and how has that expanded
What is the stack comprised of: Hardware, Software and Services
Dell IT’s internal innovation lab running Red Hat’s OpenStack distro
Last week I participated in Dell World with my trusty Flipcam (yes, I still have one, if it ain’t broke…) and caught a bunch of interviews. Several, not surprisingly, dealt with the cloud space.
The first of these is with Red Hat Sr. Solution Architect, Ian Pilcher who was on the expo floor. Ian was talking to attendees about how Red Hat and Dell are working together in the cloud space. I got him to give a short overview.
Some of the ground Ian covers
How the two companies are working together around OpenStack
What are the use cases he’s seeing for the OpenStack solution
What is Red Hat doing with Docker (Hint: see Atomic Host)
What to expect from Red Hat and Dell vis-a-vis their OpenStack solution
Extra-credit reading
Red Hat goes nuclear in Linux container wars with Atomic Host beta – The Register
Last week Dell’s cloud group was out in force at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. Its amazing to see how the event has grown since the first design summit back in July of 2010.
I got to catch up with a bunch of people, and attend a few sessions and some parties. I also got to spend a fair amount of time in our booth and was impressed by the amount of interest we had in the XPS 13 developer edition.
Near the end of the first day I joined John Furrier and Jeff Frick in the Cube for a chat. We talked about the growth of OpenStack, DevOps and Project Sputnik.
Back in September I posted an entry about the Modular Data Center that we set up in the Dell parking lot. Here is a time lapse video showing the MDC and the location being built out.
The MDC allows customers to test solutions at scale. It is running OpenStack and various Big Data goodies such as Hadoop, Hbase, Cassandra, MongoDB, Gluster etc…
Customers can tap into the MDC from Dell’s solution centers around the world and do proof of concepts as well competitive bake-offs between various big data technologies so they can determine which might best suit their environment and use case.
Why use valuable internal real estate when you can just set up a Modular Data Center (MDC) in your parking lot? The point wasn’t lost on the Dell Solution Center team who, with help from our partners Intel, is doing just that here in Round Rock.
The new MDC, which should be online in a few weeks, will host Dell’s OpenStack-Powered Cloud and Apache Hadoop solutions for customers to test drive and build POCs in Dell Solution Centers around the world.
Here’s the MDC being lowered into place yesterday.
Here are some pics I snapped this morning when I went down to get my coffee. (double click on them to see them full sized)
Last summer at OSCON Dell announced the availability of our OpenStack solution in the US and Canada. Today at World Hosting Days in Rust Germany we are now announcing that our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution is available in Europe and Asia.
If you’re not familiar with it, OpenStack is an open source cloud project built on a foundation of code initially donated by NASA and Rackspace. The project kicked off a little over a year and a half ago here in Austin and it has gained amazing traction since then.
Dell’s offering
Dell’s OpenStack cloud offering is an open source, on premise cloud solution based on the OpenStack platform running on Ubuntu. Its composed of:
The OpenStack cloud operating system
PowerEdgeC servers: C6100, C6105, C2100 and, coming soon, Dell’s new C6220 and R720
The Crowbar deployment and management software framework – developed and coded by Dell 🙂
Dell’s OpenStack reference architecture
Dell Services
Crowbar software framework
To give a little more background on the Crowbar software framework, its an open source project developed initially at Dell and you can grab it off github. The framework, which is under the Apache 2.0 license, manages the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components, allowing users to complete bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in hours, as opposed to days.
Once the initial deployment is complete, you can use Crowbar to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting. Beyond Dell, companies like VMware, Dreamhost and Zenoss have built “barclamps” that allow them to utilize Crowbar’s modular design. Additionally, customers who buy the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution get training, deployment, and support on Crowbar.
So as of today, customers in the UK, Germany and China can purchase the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution. As customer demand grows in other regions we will be adding more countries so stay tuned. If the first 18 mos of the project are any indication of whats the pace is like to come, we are all going to be in for a lot more excitement.
If you’re planning on attending the OpenStack Design summit and conference next week in Beantown you’ll have to check us out. I’m bummed that I will be missing the summit for the first time, I have a big internal presentation next week, but the rest of the Dell OpenStack crew will be there in force. Dell is a sponsor at the event and we will have a keynote, speaking sessions and demos.
What have we got in the works?
Besides checking out Crowbar and our Openstack solution which we launched back at OSCON we will have a whisper suite where we will be showing our latest and greatest stuff that is currently in the works. If you’d like to see what we have up our sleeve, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com and we can schedule a time slot for you to come and see for yourself.
Updated: For more details what we’ll be doing at the summit check out Rob’s blog
Last week at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video. Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.
Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:
Some of the ground Josh covers:
What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward
Dell has been a part of the OpenStack community since day one a little over a year ago and today’s news represents the first available cloud solution based on the OpenStack platform. This Infrastructure-as-a-service solution includes a reference architecture based on Dell PowerEdge C servers, OpenStack open source software, the Dell-developed Crowbar software and services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.
Crowbar, keeping things short and sweet
Bringing up a cloud can be no mean feat, as a result a couple of our guys began working on a software framework that could be used to quickly (typically before coffee break!) bring up a multi-node OpenStack cloud on bare metal. That framework became Crowbar. What Crowbar does is manage the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components, allowing users to complete bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in a matter of hours (or even minutes) instead of days.
Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.
Code to the Community
As mentioned above, today Dell has released Crowbar to the community as open source code (you can get access to it the project’s GitHub site). The idea is allow users to build functionality to address their specific system needs. Additionally we are working with the community to submit Crowbar as a core project in the OpenStack initiative.
Included in the Crowbar code contribution is the barclamp list, UI and remote API’s, automated testing scripts, build scripts, switch discovery, open source Chef server. We are currently working with our legal team to determine how to release the BIOS and RAID which leverage third party components. In the meantime since it is free (as in beer) software, although Dell cannot distribute it, users can directly go the vendors and download the components for free to get that functionality.
More Crowbar detail
For those who want some more detail, here are some bullets I’ve grabbed from Rob “Mr. Crowbar” Hirschfeld’s blog:
Important notes:
Crowbar uses Chef as it’s database and relies on cookbooks for node deployments
Crowbar has a modular architecture so individual components can be removed, extended, and added. These components are known individually as “barclamps.”
Each barclamp has it’s own Chef configuration, UI subcomponent, deployment configuration, and documentation.
On the roadmap:
Hadoop support
Additional operating system support
Barclamp version repository
Network configuration
We’d like suggestions! Please comment on Rob’s blog!
Today was second day of the two-day Structure conference here in San Francisco. Cloud was the topic du jours with heavy referencing of big data and concepts and projects such as OpenFlow, Open Compute and OpenStack. The format consisted mainly of moderated panels seated in comfy chairs with break out sessions scheduled a couple of times during the day.
While some of the panels and speakers were quite enlightening, I find the true benefit of a show like Structure comes from the networking and hallway conversations that occur. One such conversation was one I had with Jonathan Bryce of Rackspace about the incubation program they have just launched for OpenStack.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers:
Dealing with the question of how to expand OpenStack and include new projects
The initial three core projects: Compute, Object Storage and Image Service
The first two projects that have been approved for incubation: a dashboard and “keystone”
Cybera, a Canadian not-for-profit recently selected OpenStack along with Dell systems to build out their Infrastructure as a Service cloud. The organization, which is based in Alberta, “collaborates with public and private sector partners to accelerate research and product development that meets the needs of today’s society.”
Most recently Cybera used OpenStack to build out a cloud for CANARIE’s (Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network) DAIR project.
To start with, you’ll need hardware. If you have the time and inclination, the best thing to do might be to ask Rackspace Cloud Builders for some help spec’ing out the hardware for OpenStack. This is the route that Cybera went and we got some badly needed advice. Since you might not be able to go that route, I’ll tell you what we know.
At the end of the day we went with Dell, based on the Cloud Builders’ advice and our own due diligence. If you aren’t aware of it yet, Dell is supporting OpenStack in a big way. They have a number of pages dedicated to it here. There’s also a whitepaper that discusses hardware and network for OpenStack, if you feel like filling out the form.
We ordered four different types of servers (aka nodes). A management node (nova-api, nova-network, nova-scheduler, nova-objectstore), compute nodes (nova-compute, nova-volume), a proxy node (swift-proxy-server) and storage nodes (swift-object-*, swift-container-*, swift-account-*). All nodes were contained in the Dell C6100 chassis. Here are the specs:
Processor
Sockets
Cores
Threads
RAM
Disk
Management
E5620
2
8
16
24
8 x 300 GB
Compute
X5650
2
12
24
96
6 x 500 GB
Proxy
E5620
2
8
16
24
4 x 300 GB
Storage
E5620
2
8
16
24
6 x 2 TB
Great to see people picking up OpenStack and running with it!
Today when I was walking the floor at the Cloud Expo here in New York, I ran into fellow Austinite Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is the manager for systems integration team for Ubuntu. I got Dustin to give me the low down on the most recent UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) that concluded a few weeks ago in Budapest:
Some of the ground that Dustin covers
The big areas of focus on the server side coming out of Budapest
Getting behind OpenStack as the Ubuntu IaaS platform
[1:09] The pioneering work they’ve done with Eucalyptus and how its use case differs from that of OpenStack
[2:05] The Ensemble project, a service orchestration framework for the cloud which is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth.
[3:59] Ubuntu Orchestra for cloud installation, provisioning and configuration management (using Puppet)
Last night at Cloud Expo, I got some time with Cloud.com‘s CMO Peder Ulander to learn how they are working with two key partners, OpenStack and RightScale. Peder told me how OpenStack is a key relationship for Cloud.com and gave me a quick overview of today’s announcement that Cloud.com is powering RightScale’s myCloud Private Cloud offering:
Some of the ground Peder covers:
Open Stack: The development work Cloud.com is doing on OpenStack; their work on a Swift implementation; and how Cloud.com and OpenStack might play together going foward
[1:25] RightScale: The myCloud announcement and the advantages it brings to enterprises. How the two companies are doing joint development and joint marketing.
Today at Citrix Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” their up coming OpenStack distribution. In case you’re not familiar with it, OpenStack is an open source cloud platform based on the code from NASA’s Nebula cloud as well as Rackspace’s storage code. The OpenStack project kicked of last summer and already has gathered support from over 60 commercial hardware and software vendors.
Mt. Olympus and the Cloud
Citrix’s OpenStack Distro
Citrix’s Project Olympus will produce a commercial distribution of the OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service platform. This “Olympian” distribution will be made up of two main components: a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of XenServer. While Citrix will lead with their Xen technology, thanks to OpenStack the distro will support all leading hypervisors.
Project Olympus is targeted at both public cloud providers as well as enterprise customers looking to build out private clouds. The distribution will be available later this year.
But I want it now — The Citrix/Rackspace/Dell Early Access Program
For those who don’t want to wait until the official distribution is ready, don’t fret you can get started today through the Early Access Program (EAP). The EAP is designed to help customers kick-off pilots and proof-of-concept deployments. The program provides access to a beta version of the Citrix distro plus Dell hardware and deployment software as well as deployment services, training and on going customer support for customer clouds via Rackspace’s Cloud Builders program.
Dell’s above-mentioned deployment software, aka “crowbar,” was a big hit at the last OpenStack Design summit. The software which leverages Opscode’s Chef, allows folks to get an Openstack cloud up in running in less than four hours (instead of days). In addition to the deployment software and systems, to support the project Olympus EAP, Dell will also be providing reference architectures so keep your eyes peeled for those.
If you have any questions about what Dell is doing with OpenStack or want to get started, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Earlier this week, I attended the first two days of the OpenStack Design Summit out in Santa Clara, CA. Before I took off I grabbed sometime with Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace Cloud Builders and the leader of Rackpace’s OpenStack efforts.
I got Jim’s thoughts on how the summit was going, how the project was going as well as some breaking news.
Some of the ground Jim covers:
Jim’s areas of responsibility
How this week’s Design summit is different from the first two? (how its grown and changed)
Some of the hot topics at this summit
Breaking news re. the next release, Diablo, milestones and a regular cadence
Note: I had a brain cramp and said Ubuntu follows the Mozilla schedule, I meant GNOME (go figure)
At the last OpenStack design summit, I sat down with Eucalyptus co-founder Graziano Obertelli and got his thoughts on the effort. This morning I bumped into a now clean-shaven Graziano and thought Id get his input on this week’s summit.
Some of the ground Graziano covers:
What Graziano’s goals are for this weeks OpenStack summit
Earlier today the OpenStack Design Summit kicked off here at the Hyatt in Santa Clara. This four day event is bringing together developers, users and business people to discuss OpenStack and design its future.
Among this morning’s attendees was James Staten Forrester Research’s cloud guru. I grabbed James at the first break and got his thoughts on the event’s kick-off and OpenStack in general.
Some of the ground James covers:
Why he chose to attend and what he’s looking for
What he thought of the opening presentations and how something like an OpenStack could alleviate some of the pain of outages like Amazon had last week.
What type of outcomes he would like to see from this weeks summit.
How important are programs like Rackspace’s cloud builder effort.
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in 2010 there were 75 people in attendance. The purpose of this initial invite-only event was to “develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.”
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