Introduction to OpenStack Private Cloud In this guide In this e-guide: Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack components As the private cloud market is heating up, there are two clear Navigating the OpenStack players leading the way: VMware and OpenStack. However, services maze due to the VMware tax, along with rising performance issues, Overcome the most pressing many IT professionals are flocking to the attractive, lower-cost OpenStack security challenges alternative. Getting more PRO+ exclusive content In this exclusive e-guide, find out what sets OpenStack apart from its competitors, how to find out which OpenStack cloud service is right for your organization, and the steps to take to overcome its common security challenges. Page 1 of 17 In this guide Get your head in the cloud: Intro to Get your head in the cloud: OpenStack components Intro to OpenStack components http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Get-your-head-in-the-cloud- Navigating the OpenStack Intro-to-OpenStack-components services maze Overcome the most pressing As more and more businesses consider the different options for a private cloud OpenStack security challenges platform, it's important to know what distinguishes open source OpenStack from Getting more PRO+ exclusive content other popular cloud computing software on the market. In this article, I will attempt to explain what OpenStack is and what it is not, and explore some essential OpenStack components without getting bogged down in technical details. The OpenStack ecosystem OpenStack is very similar to Amazon EC2 in that both platforms allow users to provision VMs from a dashboard or API. The key difference between these products -- other than the fact that OpenStack is free -- is that Amazon EC2 is a public cloud service, while OpenStack allows you to build your own private cloud or subscribe to an OpenStack public cloud vendor. Page 2 of 17 In this guide OpenStack is not a hypervisor, but it is designed to work with a number of different hypervisors. Users have the option of deploying a hypervisor on the Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack machine or an OS that has a built-in hypervisor, like Linux KVM. With the components OpenStack bare-metal provisioning project, Ironic, users can push VMs onto Navigating the OpenStack bare-metal servers. services maze Overcome the most pressing There are many OpenStack components, some of which I've listed below: OpenStack security challenges Getting more PRO+ exclusive Horizon (dashboard) provides a Web-based user interface for OpenStack content services. Nova (compute) includes the controller and compute nodes. These fetch VM images from OpenStack's image service and create a VM on the target server. There are different APIs for different platforms, such as XenAPI, VMwareAPI, libvirt for Linux KVM or QEMU, API for Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Hyper-V. Neutron (networking) creates virtual networks and network interfaces, and attaches to many proprietary vendor networking products. Swift (object storage) operates like Amazon S3, meaning individual objects, like an image, are retrieved using REST Web services. Page 3 of 17 In this guide Cinder (block storage) includes disk files, like logs and more. Compared to object storage, which only allows you to replace files, block storage allows you Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack to append files. components Keystone (identity storage) grants users and processes access to different Navigating the OpenStack services maze OpenStack tools based on an authentication token that Keystone generates. Overcome the most pressing OpenStack security challenges Glance (image service) generates VM images. This is where the idea of OpenStack as a cloud operating system really manifests itself: Since images Getting more PRO+ exclusive content can be all kinds of VMs, this means there will be many different versions across different platforms, all dispatched from a common source. Glance is the catalogue of VMs you have uploaded and made available to your organization. Trove (database server) provides support for different databases. Page 4 of 17 In this guide Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack components Navigating the OpenStack services maze Overcome the most pressing OpenStack security challenges Getting more PRO+ exclusive content Page 5 of 17 In this guide OpenStack components use different variations of MySQL databases, message queue servers and Python to carry out their work. OpenStack even gives you a Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack Python command-line interface (CLI). I've included some sample commands components below to help get you started. Navigating the OpenStack services maze You can use the following command to download Keystone from public Linux Overcome the most pressing repositories: OpenStack security challenges apt-get install keystone python-keystoneclient Getting more PRO+ exclusive content To then create users on Keystone, use the command shown below: keystone user-create --name Sam --description "Sam" To list VM images with Nova, enter the following command: nova image-list To open a Python shell, type "python" and then a command such as the one below: from keystoneclient.v2_0 import client Page 6 of 17 In this guide You can then start creating users and granting permissions, one interpreted command at a time. Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack components Not familiar with Python? Never fear -- OpenStack gives you the option of using either the Python CLI or the point-and-click dashboard. Navigating the OpenStack services maze OpenStack as an open source platform Overcome the most pressing OpenStack security challenges Rackspace and NASA developed OpenStack and then gave it away as an open Getting more PRO+ exclusive content source platform. This, of course, means any programmer may write new routines or fix existing ones and then view those changes in the source code with Github. Most OpenStack contributors work for big corporate sponsors, such as Rackspace. Another major sponsor, PayPal, uses OpenStack to power its platform. There are numerous OpenStack projects, many of which are specialty projects, such as bare-metal installations. Most users don't even need the OpenStack source code, as OpenStack is available through compiled Python packages, which can be installed with the apt-get tool. Page 7 of 17 In this guide If you're interested in learning more about OpenStack or testing out OpenStack components, OpenStack offers a development version. So turn your architects Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack and programmers loose on OpenStack -- or try it out yourself -- to see how it components might fit into your organization. Navigating the OpenStack services maze To get started, you can follow our written set of instructions for installing Overcome the most pressing OpenStack on a single Ubuntu desktop. Or, you can use Canonical's OpenStack security challenges OpenStack Autopilot wizard to deploy OpenStack on. Getting more PRO+ exclusive content Navigating the OpenStack services maze http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Navigating-the-OpenStack-services- maze For IT staff looking to deploy cloud, OpenStack offers a lot of options. The open source cloud platform has a broad set of features, many of which can help organizations meet their cloud needs. But deciding which, out of the more than 25, OpenStack services will best suit your cloud environment can be tough. Page 8 of 17 In this guide Adding to the confusion are the hundreds of vendors that support OpenStack, offering a variety of distributions and additional tools and features. Meanwhile, Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack hybrid cloud adoption makes all of this more complex and exciting. In addition to components the challenges of building an OpenStack-based private cloud, hybrid cloud Navigating the OpenStack introduces new hurdles, such as bridging servers, networks and storage across services maze clouds environments. Overcome the most pressing OpenStack security challenges Matching the right OpenStack services to your cloud needs Getting more PRO+ exclusive content Let's tackle the simpler task first -- building a private cloud with OpenStack. The first issue admins face is choosing from the wide range of OpenStack cloud services available. Luckily, OpenStack has released a tool, called Project Navigator, that helps organizations determine which OpenStack services they need to build a cloud for a particular use case, such as Web serving. The Navigator pulls together a dashboard of status information on each OpenStack project module. It also shows project maturity, which is essential, since new modules are added regularly. The tool breaks out OpenStack services into six core modules that all OpenStack clouds should use, and then optional services for specific cloud use cases. Page 9 of 17 In this guide This categorization is likely to change over time, as more of these "optional" services reach full maturity. At that point, more OpenStack services -- such as Get your head in the cloud: Intro to OpenStack the Horizon Dashboard, Heat Orchestration, Magnum Containers, Congress components Governance and Barbican Key Management -- may enter the core service pack. Navigating the OpenStack services maze By providing details on OpenStack services, Navigator helps admins make Overcome the most pressing decisions about specific workloads or use cases -- but OpenStack configuration OpenStack security challenges help doesn't stop there. There are also sample OpenStack configurations aimed Getting more PRO+ exclusive at making sandboxes easy to implement. These sample configurations are content based on the experience of major OpenStack contributors, such as CERN. Using OpenStack services for hybrid cloud For reasons such as cloud bursting or backup, most organizations want to use both private and public cloud. So, while Navigator is an excellent way to kick- start a private cloud implementation, it might not be enough for hybrid deployments. When you cut through all the hype, it's still more difficult to build a hybrid cloud than it is to deploy a private or public cloud separately.