This post it to document how we setup cloud.suse.de which is one of our many internal SUSE OpenStack Cloud deployments for use by R&D.

In 2016-06 we started the deployment with SOC6 on 4 nodes. 1 controller and 3 compute nodes that also served for ceph (distributed storage) with their 2nd HDD. Since the nodes are from 2012 they only have 1gbit network and spinning disks. Thus ceph only delivers ~50 MB/s which is sufficient for many use cases.

We did not deploy that cloud with HA, even though our product supports it. The two main reasons for that are

that it will use up two or three nodes instead of one for controller services, which is significant if you start out with only 4 (and grow to 6)

that it increases the complexity of setup, operations and debugging and thus might lead to decreased availability of the cloud service

Then we have a limited supply of vlans even though technically they are just numbers between 1 and 4095, in SUSE we do allocations to be able to switch together networks from further away. So we could not use vlan mode in neutron if we want to allow software defined network (=SDN) (we did not in old.cloud.suse.de and I did not hear complaints, but now I see a lot of people using SDN)

So we went with ovs+vxlan +dvr (open vSwitch + Virtual eXtensible LAN + Distributed Virtual Router) because that allows VMs to remain reachable even when the controller node reboots.

But then I found that they cannot use DNS during that time, because distributed virtual DNS was not yet implemented. And ovs has some annoying bugs are hard to debug and fix. So I built ugly workarounds that mostly hide^Wsolve the problems from our users’ point of view.

For the next cloud deployment, I will try to use linuxbridge+vlan or linuxbridge+vxlan mode.

And the uptime is pretty good. But it could be better with proper monitoring.

Because we needed to redeploy multiple times before we got all the details right and to document the setup, we scripted most of the deployment with qa_crowbarsetup (which is part of our CI) and extra files in https://github.com/SUSE-Cloud/automation/tree/production/scripts/productioncloud. The only part not in there are the passwords.

We use proper SSL certs from our internal SUSE CA.

For that we needed to install that root CA on all involved nodes.

We use kvm, because it is the most advanced and stable of the supported hypervisors. Xen might be a possible 2nd choice. We use two custom kvm patches to fix nested virt on our G3 Opteron CPUs.

Overall we use 3 vlans. One each for admin, public/floating, sdn/storage networks.

We increased the default /24 IP ranges because we needed more IPs in the fixed and public/floating networks

For authentication, we use our internal R&D LDAP server, but since it does not have information about user’s groups, I wrote a perl script to pull that information from the Novell/innerweb LDAP server and export it as json for use by the hybrid_json assignment backend I wrote.

In addition I wrote a cloud-stats.sh to email weekly reports about utilization of the cloud and another script to tell users about which instances they still have, but might have forgotten.

On the cloud user side, we and other people use one or more of

Salt-cloud

Nova boot

salt-ssh

terraform

heat

to script instance setup and administration.

Overall we are now hosting 70 instance VMs on 5 compute nodes that together have cost us below 20000€

Both comments and pings are currently closed.