Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage

Design Guide

Last Updated: March 30, 2016

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Table of Contents

About Cisco Validated Designs

Executive Summary

Solution Overview

Introduction

Audience

Purpose of the document

Solution Summary

Technology Overview

Cisco Unified Computing System

Comprehensive Management

Radical Simplification

High Performance

Cisco UCS Manager

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects

Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis

Cisco UCS B200M4 Blade Server

Cisco UCS C240M4 Rack Server

Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders

Cisco UCS IO Adapters

Cisco UCS Differentiators

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Architecture

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (Kilo) Services

Third-party Components

Red Hat Ceph Storage

Storage Cluster Architecture

Ceph Client Architecture

RedHat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 director

Ready State Provisioning and Server Roles

Network Isolation

High Availability

Cluster Manager and Proxy Server

Cluster Services and Quorum

Cluster Modes for Core Services

Cluster Modes for Supporting Services

Compute Node Clustering

Ceph Storage Integration

OpenStack Networking ML2 Core

Cisco UCS Plugins

Cisco Nexus 1000V Plugin

Cisco Nexus Plugin

Cisco UCS Manager Plugin

Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches

Solution Design

Architectural Overview

Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Server

Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Servers

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and Cisco Nexus Switches

IO Modules

Recommended Configuration

System Hardware and Software Specifications

Bill of Materials

Cisco UCS Design

Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders

MLOM Cisco VIC Interface Cards

Fabric Failover for Ethernet

Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches

Cisco Nexus 1000v

Cisco Nexus Plugin

Cisco UCS Manager Plugin

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage Design on Cisco UCS

Planning Undercloud

Planning Overcloud

Panning Networks

Network Topology

High Availability Design with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Cisco UCS

Use Cases for Dev Test

Live Migration

Capacity

Scalability

Summary

About Authors

Acknowledgements

Executive Summary

Cisco Validated Design program consists of systems and solutions that are designed, tested, and documented to facilitate and improve customer deployments. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of our customers.

The purpose of this document is to describe the design framework used to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 on a converged stack of Cisco UCS blade and rack servers. The Cisco Unified Computing System provides the compute, network, and storage access components of the cluster, deployed as a single cohesive system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director is a toolset for installing and managing a complete OpenStack environment. The document describes Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack design on Cisco Unified Computing system (UCS).

With the growing interest, continuous evolution, and popular acceptance of OpenStack there has been an increased customer demand to have OpenStack platform validated on Cisco UCS and be made available for Enterprise private cloud, as well as other OpenStack based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud deployments. To accelerate this process and simplify the evolution to a shared cloud infrastructure, Cisco, Red Hat, and Intel have developed a validated solution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7.

Solution Overview

Introduction

Automation, virtualization, cost, and ease of deployment are the key criteria to meet the growing IT challenges. Virtualization is a key and critical strategic deployment model for reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and achieving better utilization of the platform components like hardware, software, network and storage. The platform should be flexible, reliable and cost effective for enterprise applications.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director is an automation tool for installing and managing a complete OpenStack environment. It is based primarily on TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack). TripleO takes ownership to install a fully operational OpenStack environment. This includes new OpenStack components that provision and control bare metal systems to use as OpenStack nodes. This provides a simple method for installing a complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform environment with a rich user experience.

OpenStack controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources in a datacenter managed through a dashboard or OpenStack APIs.

OpenStack is a massively scalable open source architecture that controls compute, network, and storage resources through a web user interface. The OpenStack development community operates on six-month release cycle with frequent updates. Red Hat’s OpenStack technology addresses several common challenges and uses upstream OpenStack open source architecture and enhances it for enterprise and service provider customers with better quality, stability, installation procedure, and support structure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 adopters enjoy immediate access to bug fixes and critical security patches, tight integration with Red Hat’s enterprise security features including SELinux, and a steady release cadence between OpenStack versions.

Cisco UCS solution implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides a very simplistic yet fully integrated and validated infrastructure to deploy VMs in various sizes to suit your application needs. Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a next-generation data center platform that unifies computing, network, storage access, and virtualization into a single interconnected system, which makes Cisco UCS an ideal platform for OpenStack architecture. The combined architecture of Cisco UCS platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage accelerate your IT transformation by enabling faster deployments, greater flexibility of choice, efficiency, and lower risk. Furthermore, Cisco Nexus series of switches provide the network foundation for the next-generation data center.

Audience

The audience for this document includes, but is not limited to, sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineers, IT architects, and customers who want to take advantage of an infrastructure that is built to deliver IT efficiency and enable IT innovation. The reader of this document is expected to have the necessary training and background to install and configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Nexus Switches as well as high level understanding of OpenStack components. External references are provided where applicable and it is recommended that the reader be familiar with these documents.

Readers are also expected to be familiar with the infrastructure, network and security policies of the customer installation.

Purpose of the document

This document describes the steps required to design Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 architecture on Cisco UCS platform. It discusses design choices and best practices using this shared infrastructure platform.

Solution Summary

This solution is focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (based on the upstream OpenStack Kilo release) and Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 on Cisco Unified Computing System. The advantages of Cisco UCS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform combine to deliver an OpenStack Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment that is quick and easy to setup. The solution can scale up for greater performance and capacity or scale out for environments that require consistent, multiple deployments. It provides:

·       Converged infrastructure of Compute, Networking, and Storage components from Cisco UCS

·       Is a validated enterprise-class IT platform

·       Rapid deployment for business critical applications

·       Reduces costs, minimizes risks, and increase flexibility and business agility

·       Scales up for future growth

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 on Cisco UCS helps IT organizations accelerate cloud deployments while retaining control and choice over their environments with open and inter-operable cloud solutions. It also offers redundant architecture on compute, network, and storage perspective. The solution comprises of the following key components:

·       Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

—    Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects

—    Cisco VIC 1340

—    Cisco VIC 1227

—    Cisco 2204XP IO Module or Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders

—    Cisco B200 M4 Servers

—    Cisco C240 M4 Servers

·       Cisco Nexus 9300 Series Switches

·       Cisco Nexus 1000v for KVM

·       Cisco Nexus Plugin for Nexus Switches

·       Cisco UCS Manager Plugin for Cisco UCS

·       Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x

·       Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director

·       Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7

·       Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3

The solution is designed to host scalable, mixed application workloads. The scope is limited to the infrastructure pieces of the solution. It does not address the vast area of the OpenStack components and multiple configuration choices available in OpenStack.

Technology Overview

Cisco Unified Computing System

The Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation solution for blade and rack server computing. The system integrates a low-latency; lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain. The Cisco Unified Computing System accelerates the delivery of new services simply, reliably, and securely through end-to-end provisioning and migration support for both virtualized and non-virtualized systems.

Comprehensive Management

The system uses an embedded, end-to-end management system that uses a high-availability active-standby configuration. Cisco UCS Manager uses role and policy-based management that allows IT departments to continue to use subject-matter experts to define server, network, and storage access policy. After a server and its identity, firmware, configuration, and connectivity are defined, the server, or a number of servers like it, can be deployed in minutes, rather than the hours or days that it typically takes to move a server from the loading dock to production use. This capability relieves IT administrators from tedious, manual assembly of individual components and makes scaling of Compute nodes and their configuration a straightforward process.

Radical Simplification

The Cisco Unified Computing System represents a radical simplification compared to the way that servers and networks are deployed today. It reduces network access-layer fragmentation by eliminating switching inside the blade server chassis. It integrates compute resources on a unified I/O fabric that supports standard IP protocols as well as Fiber Channel through FCoE encapsulation. The system eliminates the limitations of fixed I/O configurations with an I/O architecture that can be changed through software on a per-server basis to provide needed connectivity using a just-in-time deployment model. It simplifies lifecycle management including firmware management of underlying hardware. The result of this radical simplification is fewer switches, cables, adapters, and management points, helping reduce cost, complexity, power needs, and cooling overhead.

High Performance

The system's blade and rack servers are based on the Intel Xeon series processors. These processors adapt performance to application demands, increasing the clock rate on specific processor cores as workload and thermal conditions permit. The system is integrated within a 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based unified fabric that delivers the throughput and low-latency characteristics needed to support the varying demands of the Compute traffic, Ceph Storage, public and private network traffic.

The Cisco Unified Computing System consists of the following components:

·       Compute - The system is based on an entirely new class of computing system that incorporates rack mount and blade servers based on Intel Xeon 2600 v3 Series Processors.

·       Network - The system is integrated onto a low-latency, lossless, 10-Gbps unified network fabric. This network foundation consolidates Local Area Networks (LAN’s), Storage Area Networks (SANs), and high-performance computing networks which are separate networks today. The unified fabric lowers costs by reducing the number of network adapters, switches, and cables, and by decreasing the power and cooling requirements.

·       Virtualization - The system unleashes the full potential of virtualization by enhancing the scalability, performance, and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco security, policy enforcement, and diagnostic features are now extended into virtualized environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.

·       Storage access - The system provides consolidated access to both SAN storage and Network Attached Storage (NAS) over the unified fabric. It is also an ideal system for Software defined Storage (SDS). Combining the benefits of single framework to manage both the compute and Storage servers in a single pane, Quality of Service (QOS) can be implemented if needed to inject IO throttling in the system. In addition, the server administrators can pre-assign storage-access policies to storage resources, for simplified storage connectivity and management leading to increased productivity.

·       Management - the system uniquely integrates all system components to enable the entire solution to be managed as a single entity by the Cisco UCS Manager. The Cisco UCS Manager has an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), a command-line interface (CLI), and a powerful scripting library module for Microsoft PowerShell built on a robust application programming interface (API) to manage all system configuration and operations.

Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) fuses access layer networking and servers. This high-performance, next-generation server system provides a data center with a high degree of workload agility and scalability.

Cisco UCS Manager

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager provides unified, embedded management for all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. Using Single Connect technology, it manages, controls, and administers multiple chassis for thousands of virtual machines. Administrators use the software to manage the entire Cisco Unified Computing System as a single logical entity through an intuitive GUI, a command-line interface (CLI), or an XML API. The Cisco UCS Manager resides on a pair of Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects using a clustered, active-standby configuration for high availability.

UCS Manager offers unified embedded management interface that integrates server, network, and storage. UCS Manager performs auto-discovery to detect inventory, manage, and provision system components that are added or changed. It offers comprehensive set of XML API for third part integration, exposes 9000 points of integration and facilitates custom development for automation, orchestration, and to achieve new levels of system visibility and control.

Service profiles benefit both virtualized and non-virtualized environments and increase the mobility of non-virtualized servers, such as when moving workloads from server to server or taking a server offline for service or upgrade. Profiles can also be used in conjunction with virtualization clusters to bring new resources online easily, complementing existing virtual machine mobility.

For more Cisco UCS Manager Information, refer to: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/index.html

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects

·       The Fabric interconnects provide a single point for connectivity and management for the entire system. Typically deployed as an active-active pair, the system’s fabric interconnects integrate all components into a single, highly-available management domain controlled by Cisco UCS Manager. The fabric interconnects manage all I/O efficiently and securely at a single point, resulting in deterministic I/O latency regardless of a server or virtual machine’s topological location in the system.

·       Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects support the system’s 80-Gbps unified fabric with low-latency, lossless, cut-through switching that supports IP, storage, and management traffic using a single set of cables. The fabric interconnects feature virtual interfaces that terminate both physical and virtual connections equivalently, establishing a virtualization-aware environment in which blade, rack servers, and virtual machines are interconnected using the same mechanisms. The Cisco UCS 6248UP is a 1-RU Fabric Interconnect that features up to 48 universal ports that can support 80 Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet, or native Fiber Channel connectivity.

·       For more information, visit the following link: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-6200-series-fabric-interconnects/index.html

Figure 1       Cisco UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect – Font View

Figure 2       Cisco UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect – Rear View

Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis

The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is a crucial building block of the Cisco Unified Computing System, delivering a scalable and flexible blade server chassis. The Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis is six rack units (6RU) high and can mount in an industry-standard 19-inch rack. A single chassis can house up to eight half-width Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and can accommodate both half-width and full-width blade form factors. Four single-phase, hot-swappable power supplies are accessible from the front of the chassis. These power supplies are 92 percent efficient and can be configured to support non-redundant, N+ 1 redundant and grid-redundant configurations. The rear of the chassis contains eight hot-swappable fans, four power connectors (one per power supply), and two I/O bays for Cisco UCS 2204XP or 2208XP Fabric Extenders. A passive mid-plane provides up to 40 Gbps of I/O bandwidth per server slot and up to 80 Gbps of I/O bandwidth for two slots. The chassis is capable of supporting future 80 Gigabit Ethernet standards.

For more information, please refer to the following link: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-5100-series-blade-server-chassis/index.html

Figure 3       Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis

Front view

Back View

Cisco UCS B200M4 Blade Server

The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M4 blade server extends the capabilities of Cisco’s Unified Computing System portfolio in a half-width blade form factor. The Cisco UCS B200 M4 uses the power of the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 Series processor family CPUs with up to 768 GB of RAM (using 32 GB DIMMs), two solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs), and up to 80 Gbps throughput connectivity. The UCS B200 M4 Blade Server mounts in a Cisco UCS 5100 Series blade server chassis or UCS Mini blade server chassis. It has 24 total slots for registered ECC DIMMs (RDIMMs) or load-reduced DIMMs (LR DIMMs) for up to 768 GB total memory capacity (B200 M4 configured with two CPUs using 32 GB DIMMs). It supports one connector for Cisco’s VIC 1340 or 1240 adapter, which provides Ethernet and FCoE.

For more information, see: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b200-m4-blade-server/index.html

Figure 4        Cisco UCS B200M4 Blade Server

Cisco UCS C240M4 Rack Server

The Cisco UCS® C240 M4 Rack Server is 2-socket, 2-rack-unit (2RU) rack server. It offers outstanding performance and expandability for a wide range of storage and I/O-intensive infrastructure workloads, from Software Defined Storages to big data and collaboration. The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C240 M4 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) portfolio in a 2RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family, which delivers a superb combination of performance, flexibility, and efficiency.

Cisco UCS C240M4 servers are offered in 2 configurations:

·       Cisco UCS C240 M4 LFF (Large form factor) server provides 24 DIMM slots, up to 6 PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 slots, up to 12 front-loading LFF drives plus two (optional) internal SFF SATA boot drives for a total of 14 internal drives. It includes modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) slot for installation of a Cisco Virtual Interface Card (VIC) or third-party network interface card (NIC) without consuming a PCI slot in addition to 2 x 1 GbE embedded (on the motherboard) LOM ports. These features combine to provide outstanding levels of internal memory and storage expandability along with exceptional performance.

·       Cisco UCS C240 M4 SFF (Small form Factor) has a similar CPU and Memory configuration as LFF. However, it can take up to 24 front-loading SFF drives.

For more details please refer the following specification sheets:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/c240m4-lff-spec-sheet.pdf

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/c240m4-sff-spec-sheet.pdf

Figure 5       Cisco UCS C240M4 SFF Blade Server front and rear views

Figure 6       Cisco UCS C240M4 LFF Blade Server front and rear views

Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders

The Cisco UCS 2204XP Fabric Extender (Figure 7) has four 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, SFP+ ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2204XP has sixteen 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the mid-plane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 80 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.

The Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extender (Figure 7) has eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, and Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2208XP has thirty-two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 160 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.

Figure 7       Cisco UCS 2204XP/2208XP Fabric Extender

Cisco UCS 2204XP FEX

Cisco UCS 2208XP FEX

Cisco UCS IO Adapters

Cisco VIC 1340

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1340 is a 2-port 40-Gbps Ethernet or dual 4 x 10-Gbps Ethernet, FCoE-capable modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) designed exclusively for the M4 generation of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers. When used in combination with an optional port expander, the Cisco UCS VIC 1340 capabilities is enabled for two ports of 40-Gbps Ethernet. The Cisco UCS VIC 1340 enables a policy-based, stateless, agile server infrastructure that can present over 256 PCIe standards-compliant interfaces to the host that can be dynamically configured as either network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs).

For more information, see:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/interfaces-modules/ucs-virtual-interface-card-1340/index.html

Cisco VIC 1227 MLOM

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1227 is a dual-port Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) 10-Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)-capable PCI Express (PCIe) modular LAN-on-motherboard (mLOM) adapter designed exclusively for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers (Figure 5). New to Cisco rack servers, the mLOM slot can be used to install a Cisco VIC without consuming a PCIe slot, which provides greater I/O expandability. It incorporates next-generation converged network adapter (CNA) technology from Cisco, providing investment protection for future feature releases. The card enables a policy-based, stateless, agile server infrastructure that can present up to 256 PCIe standards-compliant interfaces to the host that can be dynamically configured as either network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs).

For more information see:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/interfaces-modules/unified-computing-system-adapters/datasheet-c78-732515.html

Cisco UCS Differentiators

Cisco’s Unified Compute System is revolutionizing the way servers are managed in data-center. Following are the unique differentiators of UCS and UCS Manager:

1.     Embedded Management —In UCS, the servers are managed by the embedded firmware in the Fabric Interconnects, eliminating need for any external physical or virtual devices to manage the servers.

2.     Unified Fabric —In UCS, from blade server chassis or rack servers to FI, there is a single Ethernet cable used for LAN, SAN and management traffic. This converged I/O results in reduced cables, SFPs and adapters – reducing capital and operational expenses of overall solution.

3.     Auto Discovery —By simply inserting the blade server in the chassis or connecting rack server to the fabric interconnect, discovery and inventory of compute resource occurs automatically without any management intervention. The combination of unified fabric and auto-discovery enables the wire-once architecture of UCS, where compute capability of UCS can be extended easily while keeping the existing external connectivity to LAN, SAN and management networks.

4.     Policy Based Resource Classification —Once a compute resource is discovered by UCS Manager, it can be automatically classified to a given resource pool based on policies defined. This capability is useful in multi-tenant cloud computing. This CVD showcases the policy based resource classification of UCS Manager.

5.     Combined Rack and Blade Server Management —UCS Manager can manage B-series blade servers and C-series rack server under the same UCS domain. This feature, along with stateless computing makes compute resources truly hardware form factor agnostic.

6.     Model based Management Architecture —UCS Manager Architecture and management database is model based and data driven. An open XML API is provided to operate on the management model. This enables easy and scalable integration of UCS Manager with other management systems.

7.     Policies, Pools, Templates —The management approach in UCS Manager is based on defining policies, pools and templates, instead of cluttered configuration, which enables a simple, loosely coupled, data driven approach in managing compute, network and storage resources.

8.     Loose Referential Integrity —In UCS Manager, a service profile, port profile or policies can refer to other policies or logical resources with loose referential integrity. A referred policy cannot exist at the time of authoring the referring policy or a referred policy can be deleted even though other policies are referring to it. This provides different subject matter experts to work independently from each-other. This provides great flexibility where different experts from different domains, such as network, storage, security, server and virtualization work together to accomplish a complex task.

9.     Policy Resolution —In UCS Manager, a tree structure of organizational unit hierarchy can be created that mimics the real life tenants and/or organization relationships. Various policies, pools and templates can be defined at different levels of organization hierarchy. A policy referring to another policy by name is resolved in the organization hierarchy with closest policy match. If no policy with specific name is found in the hierarchy of the root organization, then special policy named “default” is searched. This policy resolution practice enables automation friendly management APIs and provides great flexibility to owners of different organizations.

10.  Service Profiles and Stateless Computing —a service profile is a logical representation of a server, carrying its various identities and policies. This logical server can be assigned to any physical compute resource as far as it meets the resource requirements. Stateless computing enables procurement of a server within minutes, which used to take days in legacy server management systems.

11.  Built-in Multi-Tenancy Support —The combination of policies, pools and templates, loose referential integrity, policy resolution in organization hierarchy and a service profiles based approach to compute resources makes UCS Manager inherently friendly to multi-tenant environment typically observed in private and public clouds.

12.  Extended Memory — the enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M4 blade server extends the capabilities of Cisco’s Unified Computing System portfolio in a half-width blade form factor. The Cisco UCS B200 M4 harnesses the power of the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 Series processor family CPUs with up to 1536 GB of RAM (using 64 GB DIMMs) – allowing huge VM to physical server ratio required in many deployments, or allowing large memory operations required by certain architectures like Big-Data.

13.  Virtualization Aware Network —VM-FEX technology makes the access network layer aware about host virtualization. This prevents domain pollution of compute and network domains with virtualization when virtual network is managed by port-profiles defined by the network administrators’ team. VM-FEX also off-loads hypervisor CPU by performing switching in the hardware, thus allowing hypervisor CPU to do more virtualization related tasks. VM-FEX technology is well integrated with VMware vCenter, Linux KVM and Hyper-V SR-IOV to simplify cloud management.

14.  Simplified QoS —Even though Fiber Channel and Ethernet are converged in UCS fabric, built-in support for QoS and lossless Ethernet makes it seamless. Network Quality of Service (QoS) is simplified in UCS Manager by representing all system classes in one GUI panel.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Architecture

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform IaaS cloud is implemented as a collection of interacting services that control compute, storage, and networking resources. The cloud can be managed with a web-based dashboard or command-line clients, which allow administrators to control, provision, and automate OpenStack resources. OpenStack also has an extensive API, which is also available to all cloud users.

The following diagram provides a high-level overview of the OpenStack core services and their relationship with each other.

Figure 8       OpenStack Core Services and their Interdependencies

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (Kilo) Services

OpenStack Networking (Neutron)

OpenStack Networking handles creation and management of a virtual networking infrastructure in the OpenStack cloud. Infrastructure elements include networks, subnets, and routers. You can also deploy advanced services such as firewalls or virtual private networks (VPN).

OpenStack Networking provides cloud administrators with flexibility to decide which individual services to run on which physical systems. All service daemons can be run on a single physical host for evaluation purposes. Alternatively, each service can have a unique physical host or replicated across multiple hosts to provide redundancy.

Because OpenStack Networking is software-defined, it can react in real-time to changing network needs, such as creation and assignment of new IP addresses.

OpenStack Networking advantages include:

·       Users can create networks, control traffic, and connect servers and devices to one or more networks.

·       Flexible networking models can adapt to the network volume and tenancy.

·       IP addresses can be dedicated or floating, where floating IPs can be used for dynamic traffic rerouting.

Table 1   OpenStack Networking components

Component

Description

Network agent

Service that runs on each OpenStack node to perform local networking configuration for the node virtual machines and for networking services such as Open vSwitch.

neutron-dhcp-agent

Agent that provides DHCP services to tenant networks.

neutron-ml2

Plug-in that manages network drivers and provides routing and switching services for networking services such as Open vSwitch or Ryu networks.

neutron-server

Python daemon that manages user requests and exposes the Networking API. The default server configuration uses a plug-in with a specific set of networking mechanisms to implement the Networking API.

Other plug-ins, such as the openvswitch and linuxbridge plug-ins, use native Linux networking mechanisms, while other plug-ins interface with external devices or SDN controllers.

Neutron

Command-line client to access the API.

OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder)

OpenStack Block Storage provides persistent block storage management for virtual hard drives. Block Storage enables the user to create and delete block devices, and to manage attachment of block devices to servers.

The actual attachment and detachment of devices is handled through integration with the Compute service. You can use regions and zones to handle distributed block storage hosts.

You can use Block Storage in performance-sensitive scenarios, such as database storage or expandable file systems. You can also use it as a server with access to raw block-level storage.

Additionally, you can take volume snapshots to restore data or to create new block storage volumes. Snapshots are dependent on driver support.

OpenStack Block Storage advantages include:

·       Creating, listing and deleting volumes and snapshots.

·       Attaching and detaching volumes to running virtual machines.

Although the main Block Storage services, such as volume, scheduler, API, can be co-located in a production environment, it is more common to deploy multiple instances of the volume service along one or more instances of the API and scheduler services to manage them.

Table 2   Block Storage components

Component

Description

openstack-cinder-api

Responds to requests and places them in the message queue. When a request is received, the API service verifies that identity requirements are met and translates the request into a message that includes the required block storage action. The message is then sent to the message broker for processing by the other Block Storage services.

openstack-cinder-backup

Backs up a Block Storage volume to an external storage repository. By default, OpenStack uses the Object Storage service to store the backup. You can also use Ceph, NFS, or GlusterFS back ends as storage repositories for backups.

openstack-cinder-scheduler

Assigns tasks to the queue and determines the provisioning volume server. The scheduler service reads requests from the message queue and determines on which block storage host to perform the requested action. The scheduler then communicates with the openstack-cinder-volume service on the selected host to process the request.

openstack-cinder-volume

Designates storage for virtual machines. The volume service manages the interaction with the block-storage devices. When requests arrive from the scheduler, the volume service can create, modify, or remove volumes. The volume service includes several drivers to interact with the block-storage devices, such as NFS, Red Hat Storage, or Dell EqualLogic.

cinder

Command-line client to access the Block Storage API.

The following diagram shows the relationship between the Block Storage API, the scheduler, the volume services, and other OpenStack components.

Figure 9       OpenStack Block Storage Service

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

OpenStack Compute serves as the core of the OpenStack cloud by providing virtual machines on demand. Compute schedules virtual machines to run on a set of nodes by defining drivers that interact with underlying virtualization mechanisms, and by exposing the functionality to the other OpenStack components.

Computes supports the libvirt driver libvirtd that uses KVM as the hypervisor. The hypervisor creates virtual machines and enables live migration from node to node.

Compute interacts with the Identity service to authenticate instance and database access, with the Image service to access images and launch instances, and with the dashboard service to provide user and administrative interface.

You can restrict access to images by project and by user, and specify project and user quotes, such as the number of instances that can be created by a single user.

When you deploy a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform cloud, you can break down the cloud according to different categories:

Regions

Each service cataloged in the Identity service is identified by the service region, which typically represents a geographical location, and the service endpoint. In a cloud with multiple compute nodes, regions enable discrete separation of services.

You can also use regions to share infrastructure between Compute installations while maintaining a high degree of failure tolerance.

Host Aggregates and Availability Zones

A single Compute deployment can be partitioned into logical groups. You can create multiple groups of hosts that share common resources such as storage and network, or groups that share a special property such as trusted computing hardware.

To administrators, the group is presented as a Host Aggregate with assigned compute nodes and associated metadata. The Host Aggregate metadata is commonly used to provide information for openstack-nova-scheduler actions, such as limiting specific flavors or images to a subset of hosts.

To users, the group is presented as an Availability Zone. The user cannot view the group metadata or see the list of hosts in the zone.

The benefits of aggregates, or zones, include:

·       Load balancing and instance distribution.

·       Physical isolation and redundancy between zones, implemented with a separate power supply or network equipment.

·       Labeling for groups of servers that have common attributes.

·       Separation of different classes of hardware.

Table 3   Compute components

Component

Description

openstack-nova-api

Handles requests and provides access to the Compute services, such as booting an instance.

openstack-nova-cert

Provides the certificate manager.

openstack-nova-compute

Runs on each node to create and terminate virtual instances. The compute service interacts with the hypervisor to launch new instances, and ensures that the instance state is maintained in the Compute database.

openstack-nova-conductor

Provides database-access support for compute nodes to reduce security risks.

openstack-nova-consoleauth

Handles console authentication.

openstack-nova-network

Network services that can serve as an alternative to OpenStack Networking and handle basic network traffic for private and public access.

openstack-nova-novncproxy

Provides a VNC proxy for browsers to enable VNC consoles to access virtual machines.

openstack-nova-scheduler

Dispatches requests for new virtual machines to the correct node based on configured weights and filters.

nova

Command-line client to access the Compute API.

The following diagram shows the relationship between the Compute services and other OpenStack components.

Figure 10    OpenStack Compute Services

OpenStack Image (Glance)

OpenStack Image acts as a registry for virtual disk images. Users can add new images or take a snapshot of an existing server for immediate storage. You can use the snapshots for backup or as templates for new servers.

Registered images can be stored in the Object Storage service or in other locations, such as simple file systems or external Web servers.

The following image disk formats are supported:

·       aki/ami/ari (Amazon kernel, ramdisk, or machine image)

·       iso (archive format for optical discs, such as CDs)

·       qcow2 (Qemu/KVM, supports Copy on Write)

·       raw (unstructured format)

·       vhd (Hyper-V, common for virtual machine monitors from vendors such as VMware, Xen, Microsoft, and VirtualBox)

·       vdi (Qemu/VirtualBox)

·       vmdk (VMware)

Container formats can also be registered by the Image service. The container format determines the type and detail level of the virtual machine metadata to store in the image.

The following container formats are supported:

·       bare (no metadata)

·       ova (OVA tar archive)

·       ovf (OVF format)

·       aki/ami/ari (Amazon kernel, ramdisk, or machine image)

Table 4   Image components

Component

Description

openstack-glance-api

Interacts with storage back ends to handle requests for image retrieval and storage. The API uses openstack-glance-registry to retrieve image information. You must not access the registry service directly.

openstack-glance-registry

Manages all metadata for each image.

glance

Command-line client to access the Image API.

The following diagram shows the main interfaces that the Image service uses to register and retrieve images from the Image database.

Figure 11    OpenStack Image Storage Service

OpenStack Orchestration (Heat)

OpenStack Orchestration provides templates to create and manage cloud resources such as storage, networking, instances, or applications. Templates are used to create stacks, which are collections of resources.

For example, you can create templates for instances, floating IPs, volumes, security groups, or users. Orchestration offers access to all OpenStack core services with a single modular template, as well as capabilities such as auto-scaling and basic high availability.

OpenStack Orchestration advantages include:

·       A single template provides access to all underlying service APIs.

·       Templates are modular and resource-oriented.

·       Templates can be recursively defined and reusable, such as nested stacks. The cloud infrastructure can then be defined and reused in a modular way.

·       Resource implementation is pluggable, which allows for custom resources.

·       Resources can be auto-scaled, and therefore added or removed from the cluster based on usage.

·       Basic high availability functionality is available.

Table 5   Orchestration Components

Component

Description

openstack-heat-api

OpenStack-native REST API that processes API requests by sending the requests to the openstack-heat-engine service over RPC.

openstack-heat-api-cfn

Optional AWS-Query API compatible with AWS CloudFormation that processes API requests by sending the requests to the openstack-heat-engine service over RPC.

openstack-heat-engine

Orchestrates template launch and generates events for the API consumer.

openstack-heat-cfntools

Package of helper scripts such as cfn-hup, which handle updates to metadata and execute custom hooks.

heat

Command-line tool that communicates with the Orchestration API to execute AWS CloudFormation APIs.

The following diagram shows the main interfaces that the Orchestration service uses to create a new stack of two new instances and a local network.

Figure 12    OpenStack Orchestration Service

OpenStack Identity (Keystone)

OpenStack Identity provides user authentication and authorization to all OpenStack components. Identity supports multiple authentication mechanisms, including user name and password credentials, token-based systems, and AWS-style log-ins.

By default, the Identity service uses a MariaDB back end for token, catalog, policy, and identity information. This back end is recommended for development environments or to authenticate smaller user sets. You can also use multiple identity back ends concurrently, such as LDAP and SQL. You can also use memcache or Redis for token persistence.

Identity supports Federation with SAML. Federated Identity establishes trust between Identity Providers (IdP) and the services that Identity provides to the end user.

Federated Identity and concurrent multiple back ends require Identity API v3 and Apache HTTPD deployment instead of Eventlet deployment.

OpenStack Identity advantages include:

·       User account management, including associated information such as a name and password. In addition to custom users, a user must be defined for each cataloged service. For example, the glance user must be defined for the Image service.

·       Tenant, or project, management. Tenants can be the user group, project, or organization.

·       Role management. Roles determine the user permissions. For example, a role might differentiate between permissions for a sales rep and permissions for a manager.

·       Domain management. Domains determine the administrative boundaries of Identity service entities, and support multi-tenancy, where a domain represents a grouping of users, groups, and tenants. A domain can have more than one tenant, and if you use multiple concurrent Identity providers, each provider has one domain.

Table 6   Identity Components

Component

Description

openstack-keystone

Provides Identity services, together with the administrative and public APIs. Both Identity API v2 and API v3 are supported.

keystone

Command-line client to access the Identity API.

The following diagram shows the basic authentication flow that Identity uses to authenticate users with other OpenStack components.

Figure 13    OpenStack Identity Service

OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon)

OpenStack Dashboard provides a graphical user interface for users and administrators to perform operations such as creating and launching instances, managing networking, and setting access control.

The Dashboard service provides the Project, Admin, and Settings default dashboards. The modular design enables the dashboard to interface with other products such as billing, monitoring, and additional management tools.

The following image shows an example of the Compute panel in the Admin dashboard.

Figure 14    RedHat OpenStack Dashboard

The role of the user that logs in to the dashboard determines which dashboards and panels are available.

Table 7   Dashboard Components

Component

Description

openstack-dashboard

Django Web application that provides access to the dashboard from any Web browser.

Apache HTTP server (httpd service)

Hosts the application.

The following diagram shows an overview of the dashboard architecture.

Figure 15    OpenStack Dashboard Services

The example shows the following interaction:

·       The OpenStack Identity service authenticates and authorizes users

·       The session back end provides database services

·       The httpd service hosts the Web application and all other OpenStack services for API calls

OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer)

OpenStack Telemetry provides user-level usage data for OpenStack-based clouds. The data can be used for customer billing, system monitoring, or alerts. Telemetry can collect data from notifications sent by existing OpenStack components such as Compute usage events, or by polling OpenStack infrastructure resources such as libvirt.

Telemetry includes a storage daemon that communicates with authenticated agents through a trusted messaging system to collect and aggregate data. Additionally, the service uses a plug-in system that you can use to add new monitors. You can deploy the API Server, central agent, data store service, and collector agent on different hosts.

The service uses a MongoDB database to store collected data. Only the collector agents and the API server have access to the database.

Table 8   Telemetry Components

Component

Description

openstack-ceilometer-alarm-evaluator

Triggers state transitions on alarms.

openstack-ceilometer-alarm-notifier

Executes actions when alarms are triggered.

openstack-ceilometer-api

Runs on one or more central management servers to provide access to data in the database.

openstack-ceilometer-central

Runs on a central management server to poll for utilization statistics about resources independent from instances or Compute nodes. The agent cannot be horizontally scaled, so you can run only a single instance of this service at a time.

openstack-ceilometer-collector

Runs on one or more central management servers to monitor the message queues. Each collector processes and translates notification messages to Telemetry messages, and sends the messages back to the message bus with the relevant topic.

Telemetry messages are written to the data store without modification. You can choose where to run these agents, because all intra-agent communication is based on AMQP or REST calls to the ceilometer-api service, similar to the ceilometer-alarm-evaluator service.

openstack-ceilometer-compute

Runs on each Compute node to poll for resource utilization statistics. Each nova-compute node must have a ceilometer-compute agent deployed and running.

openstack-ceilometer-notification

Pushes metrics to the collector service from various OpenStack services.

ceilometer

Command-line client to access the Telemetry API.

The following diagram shows the interfaces used by the Telemetry service.

Figure 16    OpenStack Telemetry Service

Third-party Components

Some Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform components use third-party databases, services, and tools.

Databases

·       MariaDB is the default database that is shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. MariaDB enables Red Hat to fully support open source community-developed software. Each OpenStack component except Telemetry requires a running MariaDB service. Therefore, you need to deploy MariaDB before you deploy a full OpenStack cloud service or before you install any standalone OpenStack component.

·       The Telemetry service uses a MongoDB database to store collected usage data from collector agents. Only the collector agents and the API server have access to the database.

Messaging

RabbitMQ is a robust open-source messaging system based on the AMQP standard. RabbitMQ is a high-performance message broker used in many enterprise systems with widespread commercial support. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, RabbitMQ is the default and recommended message broker.

RabbitMQ managers OpenStack transactions including queuing, distribution, security, management, clustering, and federation. It also serves a key role in high availability and clustering scenarios.

External Caching

External applications for caching, such as memcached or Redis, offer persistence and shared storage and speed up dynamic web applications by reducing the database load. External caching is used by various OpenStack components, for example:

·       The Object Storage service uses memcached to cache authenticated clients, instead of requiring each client to re-authorize each interaction.

·       By default, the dashboard uses memcached for session storage.

·       The Identity service uses Redis or memcached for token persistence.

Red Hat Ceph Storage

Red Hat Ceph is a distributed data object store designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability. Distributed object stores are the future of storage, because they accommodate unstructured data, and because clients can use modern object interfaces and legacy interfaces simultaneously. For example:

·       Native language binding interfaces (C/C++, Java, Python)

·       RESTful interfaces (S3/Swift)

·       Block device interfaces

·       Filesystem interfaces

The power of Red Hat Ceph can transform your organization’s IT infrastructure and your ability to manage vast amounts of data, especially for cloud computing platforms like Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Red Hat Ceph delivers industry-leading scalability –thousands of clients accessing petabytes to exabytes of data and beyond.

At the heart of every Ceph deployment is the Ceph Storage Cluster. It consists of two types of daemons:

·       Ceph OSD Daemon: Ceph OSDs store data on behalf of Ceph clients. Additionally, Ceph OSDs utilize the CPU and memory of Ceph nodes to perform data replication, rebalancing, recovery, monitoring and reporting functions.

·       Ceph Monitor: A Ceph monitor maintains a master copy of the Ceph storage cluster map with the current state of the storage cluster.

Ceph client interfaces read data from and write data to the Ceph storage cluster. Clients need the following data to communicate with the Ceph storage cluster:

·       The Ceph configuration file, or the cluster name (usually ceph) and monitor address

·       The pool name

·       The user name and the path to the secret key.

Ceph clients maintain object IDs and the pool name(s) where they store the objects, but they do not need to maintain an object-to-OSD index or communicate with a centralized object index to look up data object locations. To store and retrieve data, Ceph clients access a Ceph monitor and retrieve the latest copy of the storage cluster map. Then, Ceph clients can provide an object name and pool name, and Ceph will use the cluster map and the CRUSH (Controlled Replication under Scalable Hashing) algorithm to compute the object placement group and the primary Ceph OSD for storing or retrieving data. The Ceph client connects to the primary OSD where it may perform read and write operations. There is no intermediary server, broker or bus between the client and the OSD.

When an OSD stores data, it receives data from a Ceph client—whether the client is a Ceph Block Device, a Ceph Object Gateway or another interface—and it stores the data as an object. Each object corresponds to a file in a filesystem, which is stored on a storage device such as a hard disk. Ceph OSDs handle the read/write operations on the storage device.

Ceph OSDs store all data as objects in a flat namespace (e.g., no hierarchy of directories). An object has a cluster-wide unique identifier, binary data, and metadata consisting of a set of name/value pairs. The semantics are completely up to Ceph clients. For example, the Ceph block device maps a block device image to a series of objects stored across the cluster.

Storage Cluster Architecture

A Ceph Storage Cluster accommodates large numbers of Ceph nodes for effectively massive scalability, high availability and performance. Each node leverages commodity hardware and intelligent Ceph daemons that communicate with each other to:

·       Store and retrieve data

·       Replicate data

·       Monitor and report on cluster health (heartbeating)

·       Redistribute data dynamically (backfilling)

·       Ensure data integrity (scrubbing)

·       Recover from failures.

To the Ceph client interface that reads and writes data, a Ceph storage cluster looks like a simple pool where it stores data. However, the storage cluster performs many complex operations in a manner that is completely transparent to the client interface. Ceph clients and Ceph OSDs both use the CRUSH (Controlled Replication under Scalable Hashing) algorithm. Ceph Client Architecture.

Ceph Client Architecture

Ceph clients differ in their materially in how they present data storage interfaces. A Ceph block device presents block storage that mounts just like a physical storage drive. A Ceph gateway presents an object storage service with S3-compliant and Swift-compliant RESTful interfaces with its own user management. However, all Ceph clients use the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS) protocol to interact with the Ceph storage cluster; and, they all have the same basic needs:

·       The Ceph configuration file, or the cluster name (usually ceph) and monitor address

·       The pool name

·       The user name and the path to the secret key.

Ceph clients tend to follow some similar patterns, such as object-watch-notify and striping.

RedHat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 director

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, is an integrated foundation, to create, deploy, and scale a secure and reliable public or private OpenStack cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform starts with the proven foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and integrates Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform technology to provide a production-ready cloud platform backed by an ecosystem of more than 350 certified partners.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 is based on the community Kilo OpenStack release. This release is Red Hat’s fifth iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform which has been successfully deployed by Red Hat customers worldwide across diverse vertical industries including financial, telecommunications, and education.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 introduces Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director, a cloud installation and lifecycle management tool chain. Director is the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform installer to deploy OpenStack on and with OpenStack. This section introduces Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director’s architecture and describes the following features:

·       Simplified deployment through ready-state provisioning of bare metal resources.

·       Flexible network definitions

·       High availability via tight integration with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server High Availability Add-on

·       Integrated setup and installation of Red Hat Ceph Storage

·       Content management via the Red Hat Content Delivery Network or Red Hat Satellite Server

Ready State Provisioning and Server Roles

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director is a converged installer. It combines mature upstream OpenStack deployment projects (TripleO and Ironic) with components from Red Hat’s past Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform installers.

TripleO stands for OpenStack on OpenStack. TripleO is an upstream OpenStack project that uses an existing OpenStack environment to install a production OpenStack environment. The deployment environment is called the undercloud. The production environment is called overcloud.

The undercloud is the TripleO control plane. It uses native OpenStack APIs and services to deploy, configure, and manage the production OpenStack deployment. The undercloud defines the overcloud with Heat templates and then deploys it via the Ironic baremetal provisioning service. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director includes Heat predefined templates for the basic server roles that comprise the overcloud. Customizable templates allow director to deploy, redeploy, and scale complex overclouds in a repeatable fashion.

Ironic is a community bare-metal provisioning project. Director uses Ironic to deploy the overcloud servers. Ironic gathers information about baremetal servers via a discovery mechanism known as introspection. Ironic pairs servers with a bootable disk image and then installs them via PXE and remote power management.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director deploys all servers with the same generic image by injecting Puppet modules into the generic disk image to tailor it for specific server roles. It then applies host-specific customizations via Puppet including network and storage configurations.

While the undercloud is primarily used to deploy OpenStack, overcloud is a functional cloud available to run virtual machines and workloads. Servers in the following roles comprise the overcloud:

Control

This role provides the endpoint for REST-based API queries to the majority of the OpenStack services. These include Compute, Image, Identity, Block, Network, and Data processing. The controller can run as a standalone server or as a HA cluster.

Compute

This role provides the processing, memory, storage, and networking resources to run virtual machine instances. They run the KVM hypervisor by default. New instances are spawned across compute nodes in a round-robin fashion.

Ceph Storage

Ceph is a distributed object store and file system. This role deploys Object Storage Daemon (OSD) nodes for Ceph clusters. It also installs the Ceph Monitor service on the controller.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director also includes advanced hardware configuration tools. These tools validate server hardware prior to installation. Profile matching lets administrators specify hardware requirements for each server role. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director only matches servers that meet minimum hardware requirements for each role. Profile to matching is performed after introspection but prior to deployment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director also supports pre-installation benchmark collection. Servers boot to a customized RAMdisk and run a series of benchmarks. The benchmarks report performance outliers to identify underperforming nodes prior to installation.

Network Isolation

OpenStack requires multiple network functions. While it is possible to collapse all network functions onto a single network interface, isolating communication streams in their own physical or virtual networks provides better performance and scalability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director supports isolating network traffic by type. One or more network traffic types can be assigned to a physical, virtual, or bonded interface. It is to be noted however that LACP bonding mode is not possible when Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects are in use. Multiple traffic types can be combined across the same physical interfaces or switches. Each OpenStack service is bound to an IP on a particular network. A virtual IP is created on that network and shared among all of the HA controllers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director supports network isolation for the following traffic types:

Provisioning

The control plane installs the overcloud via this network. All cluster nodes must have a physical interface attached to the provisioning network. This network carries DHCP/PXE and TFTP traffic so it must be provided on a dedicated interface or a native VLAN to the boot interface. The provisioning interface can act as a default gateway for the overcloud if there is no other gateway on the network. Disable PXE on the remaining interfaces to ensure the servers boot from this network.

External

The External network is used for hosting the Horizon dashboard and the Public APIs, as well as hosting the floating IPs that are assigned to VMs. The Neutron L3 routers which perform NAT are attached to this interface. The range of IPs that are assigned to floating IPs should not include the IPs used for hosts and VIPs on this network.

Internal API

This network is used for connections to the API servers, as well as RPC messages using

RabbitMQ and connections to the database. The Glance Registry API uses this network, as does the Cinder API. This network is typically only reachable from inside the OpenStack Overcloud environment, so API calls from outside the cloud will use the Public APIs.

Tenant

Virtual machines communicate over the tenant network. It supports three modes of operation: VXLAN, GRE, and VLAN. VXLAN and GRE tenant traffic is delivered via software tunnels on a single VLAN. Individual VLANs correspond to tenant networks in the case where VLAN tenant networks are used.

Storage

This network carries storage communication including Ceph, Cinder, and Swift traffic. The virtual machine instances communicate with the storage servers via this network. Data-intensive OpenStack deployments should isolate storage traffic on a dedicated high bandwidth interface, i.e. 10 GB interface. The Glance API, Swift proxy, and Ceph Public interface services are all delivered via this network.

Storage Management

Storage management communication can generate large amounts of network traffic. This network is shared between the front and back end storage nodes. Storage controllers use this network to access data storage nodes. This network is also used for storage clustering and replication traffic.

Network traffic types are assigned to network interfaces through Heat template customizations prior to deploying the overcloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director supports several network interface types including physical interfaces, bonded interfaces (not with Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects), and either tagged or native 802.1Q VLANs.

Network Types by Server Role

The previous section discussed server roles. Each server role requires access to specific types of network traffic. The network isolation feature allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director to segment network traffic by particular network types. When using network isolation, each server role must have access to its required network traffic types.

By default, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director collapses all network traffic to the provisioning interface. This configuration is suitable for evaluation, proof of concept, and development environments. It is not recommended for production environments where scaling and performance are primary concerns. Table below summarizes the required network types by server role.

Tenant Network Types

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 supports tenant network communication through the OpenStack Networking (Neutron) service. OpenStack Networking supports overlapping IP address ranges across tenants via the Linux kernel’s network namespace capability. It also supports three default networking types:

VLAN segmentation mode

Each tenant is assigned a network subnet mapped to a 802.1q VLAN on the physical network. This tenant networking type requires VLAN-assignment to the appropriate switch ports on the physical network.

GRE

The GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) type driver provides an alternative form of network segregation. Virtual networks are created within Neutron, and then associated with VMs in Nova. When VMs are launched, the mechanism driver attaches the virtual network interface of the VM to a virtual network. The mechanism driver on the Compute host forms GRE tunnels between the virtual network interface of the VM and the virtual network interface of all other VMs on the same virtual network. This mesh is used both for point-to-point traffic between one VM and another, and broadcast traffic, which is sent simultaneously to all VMs on the virtual network.

VXLAN

The VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) type driver provides another method of network segregation. Virtual networks are created within Neutron, and then associated with VMs in Nova. When VMs are launched, the mechanism driver attaches the virtual network interface of the VM to a virtual network. VXLAN Segment IDs provides network segmentation and isolation, and Neutron uses Linux Network Namespaces to allow overlapping IP address ranges between the virtual networks

High Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director’s approach to high availability OpenStack leverages Red Hat’s internal expertise with distributed cluster systems. Most of the technologies discussed in this section are available through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server High Availability Add On. These technologies are bundled with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 to provide cluster services for production deployments.

Cluster Manager and Proxy Server

Two components drive HA for all core and non-core OpenStack services: the cluster manager and the proxy server.

The cluster manager is responsible for the startup and recovery of an inter-related services across a set of physical machines. It tracks the cluster’s internal state across multiple machines. State changes trigger appropriate responses from the cluster manager to ensure service availability and data integrity.

Cluster Manager Benefits

·       Deterministic recovery of a complex, multi-machine application stack

·       State awareness of other cluster machines to co-ordinate service startup and failover.

·       Shared quorum calculation to determine majority set of surviving cluster nodes after a failure.

·       Data integrity through fencing. Machines running a non-responsive process are isolated to ensure they are not still responding to remote requests. Machines are typically fenced via a remotely accessible power switch or IPMI controller.

·       Automated recovery of failed instances to prevent additional load-induced failures.

·       In Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform’s HA model, clients do not directly connect to service endpoints. Connection requests are routed to service endpoints by a proxy server.

Proxy Server Benefits

·       Connections are load balanced across service endpoints

·       Service requests can be monitored in a central location

·       Cluster nodes can be added or removed without interrupting service

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director uses HAproxy and Pacemaker to manage HA services and load balance connection requests. With the exception of RabbitMQ and Galera, HAproxy distributes connection requests to active nodes in a round-robin fashion. Galera and RabbitMQ use persistent options to ensure requests go only to active and/or synchronized nodes. Pacemaker checks service health at 1 second intervals. Timeout settings vary by service.

Benefits of combining Pacemaker and HAproxy:

·       Detects and recovers machine and application failures

·       Starts and stops OpenStack services in the correct order

·       Responds to cluster failures with appropriate actions including resource failover and machine restart and fencing

·       Provides a thoroughly tested code base that has been used in production clusters across a variety of use cases.

The following services deployed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director do not use the proxy server:

·       RabbitMQ

·       Memcached

·       Mongodb

Individual cluster services are discussed in the following section.

Cluster Services and Quorum

Each clustered service operates in one of the following modes:

Active/active

Requests are load balanced between multiple cluster nodes running the same services. Traffic intended for failed nodes is sent to the remaining nodes.

Active/passive

A redundant copy of a running service is brought online when the primary node fails.

Hot Standby

Connections are only routed to one of several active service endpoints. New connections are routed to a standby endpoint if the primary service endpoint fails.

Mixed

Mixed has one of two meanings: services within a group run in different modes, or the service runs active/active but is used as active/passive. Mixed services are explained individually.

Single

Each node runs an independent cluster manager that only monitors its local service.

A cluster quorum is the majority node set when a failure splits the cluster into two or more partitions. In this situation the majority fences the minority to ensure both sides are not running the same services — a so-called split brain situation. Fencing is the process of isolating a failed machine — typically via remote power control or networked switches — by powering it off. This is necessary to ensure data integrity.

Cluster Modes for Core Services

This section of the paper describes Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director’s default cluster mode for each OpenStack service.

The following table lists service mode by service.

Table 9   OpenStack Services with its Cluster Mode

Cluster Modes for Supporting Services

The majority of the core OpenStack services run in active/active mode. The same is true for the supporting services, although several of them field connection requests directly from clients rather than HAproxy.

The following table lists the cluster mode for the non-core OpenStack services.

Figure 17    Non-core OpenStack Services with its Cluster Mode

Compute Node Clustering

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform installs compute nodes as single-node clusters in order to monitor their health and that of the services running on them.

In the event that a compute node fails, Pacemaker restarts compute node services in the following order:

·       neutron-ovs-agent

·       ceilometer-compute

·       nova-compute

If a service fails to start, the node where the service is running will be fenced in order to guarantee data integrity.

Ceph Storage Integration

Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 is a distributed data object store designed for performance, reliability, and scalability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 director can deploy an integrated Ceph cluster in the overcloud. The integrated Ceph cluster acts as a storage virtualization layer for Glance images, Cinder volumes, and Nova ephemeral storage. Figure 18 below depicts Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 director Ceph cluster integration from a high level. The Ceph cluster consists of two types of daemons: Ceph OSD and Ceph Monitor. The Ceph OSD Daemon stores data in pools striped across one or more disks. Ceph OSDs also replicate, rebalance, and recover data, and report data usage.

The Ceph Monitor maintains a master copy of the Ceph storage map and the current state of the storage cluster. Ceph clients consult the Ceph monitor to receive the latest copy of the storage map then communicate directly with the primary data-owning OSD.

Figure 18    Ceph Integration

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director can install a Ceph cluster with one or more OSD servers. By default the OSD server will use free space on its primary disk for the OSD storage device. Additional OSDs can be configured through Puppet customizations prior to deploying overcloud. Ceph performance scales with the number of OSD disks. The Ceph monitor is installed on the controller nodes whenever a Ceph storage role is deployed in overcloud.

OpenStack Networking ML2 Core

Conventional Neutron suffered from the one driver syndrome i.e. only a single plugin could be loaded in any deployment. There was no clean way to get multiple drivers working seamlessly together. There was also a huge amount of duplicate code across the drivers e.g. everyone had to manage segments for their drivers. To address these issues, the Modular Layer 2 plugin (ML2) was created with an architecture allowing multiple type drivers and mechanism drivers to manage details of specific network segment types and networking mechanisms for implementing segments. Type drivers manage a type of network, namely segmentation and allocation for that network type. A VLAN type driver will manage allocation of VLAN segments for a VLAN type network. Mechanism drivers are drivers that manage specific mechanisms like vendor devices, open source devices. Every device needs a mechanism driver to integrate with Neutron e.g. OVS, Cisco Nexus, APIC etc. Cisco has separate mechanism drivers for Cisco Nexus Switches, Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, Cisco Nexus 1000V etc.

Cisco UCS Plugins

Cisco Nexus 1000V Plugin

Cisco Nexus 1000V OpenStack solution is an enterprise-grade virtual networking solution, which offers Security, Policy control and Visibility all with Layer2/Layer 3 switching at the hypervisor layer.  Cisco Nexus 1000V provides stateful firewall functionality within your infrastructure to isolate tenants and enables isolation of virtual machines with policy-based VM attributes. Cisco Nexus 1000V’s robust policy framework enables centralized enterprise-compliant policy management, pre-provisioning of policies on a network-wide basis and simplifies policy additions and modifications across the virtual infrastructure. When it comes to application visibility, Cisco Nexus 1000V provides insight into live and historical VM migrations and advanced automated troubleshooting capabilities to identify problems in seconds. It also enables you to use your existing monitoring tools to provide rich analytics and auditing capabilities across your physical and virtual infrastructure.

·       Layer2/Layer3 Switching – Cisco Nexus 1000V offers the capability to route traffic within the tenant without having to go to an external router. This capability reduces sub-optimal traffic patterns within the network and increases the network performance.

·       Security – Cisco Nexus 1000V is compatible with Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) which provides layer 2 zone based firewall capability. Using VSG, Nexus 1000V can secure traffic by providing stateful firewall functionality. VSG enables the users to define security attributes based on network attributes.

·       Policy Frame Work – Cisco Nexus 1000V provides an extremely powerful policy frame work to define polices per tenant and make these policies available to the end user via Horizon Dashboard or via Neutron API. All these polices can be centrally managed which makes it easier to roll out new business polices or modify existing business polices instantaneously

·       Application Visibility – Nexus 1000V brings in a slew of industry proven monitoring features that exist in the physical Nexus infrastructure to virtual networking. To name a few of them, Nexus 1000V provides remote-monitoring capabilities by using SPAN/ERSPAN, provides visibility into VM motion by using vTacker and provides consolidated interface status, traffic statistics using Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM)

All the monitoring, management and functionality features offered on the Nexus 1000V are consistent with the physical Nexus infrastructure. This enables customer to reuse the existing tool chains to manage the new virtual networking infrastructure as well. Along with this, customer can also have the peace of mind that the feature functionality they enjoyed in the physical network will now be the same in the virtual network.

Cisco Nexus 1000V Components

Nexus 1000v brings the same robust architecture associated with traditional Cisco physical modular switches and with other virtualization environments (for example, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V) to OpenStack deployments.

The Nexus1000v has the following main components:

·       The Cisco Nexus® 1000V Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) is a software component that is deployed on each Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) host. Each virtual machine on the host is connected to the VEM through virtual Ethernet (vEth) ports.

·       The Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) is the management component that controls multiple VEMs and helps in the definition of virtual machine-focused network policies. It is deployed on Controllers in Active/Standby mode.

·       The OpenStack Neutron ML2 driver for Nexus 1000v is used for communication between the VSM and OpenStack Neutron service and is deployed as part of the OpenStack Neutron service.

·       The OpenStack Horizon integration for policy profile.

Each of these components are tightly integrated with the OpenStack environment:

·       The VEM is a hypervisor-resident component and is tightly integrated with the KVM architecture.

·       The VSM is integrated with OpenStack using the OpenStack Neutron ML2 driver for Nexus 1000v.

·       The OpenStack Neutron API has been extended to include one additional user-defined resource:

—    Policy profiles group port policy information used for features such as Security (ACL’s), monitoring, VLAN trunk, PVLAN, Netflow and IGMP snooping.

Figure 19    Cisco Nexus 1000V with OpenStack

Cisco Nexus Plugin

The Cisco Nexus driver for OpenStack Neutron allows customers to easily build their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) networks using the industry’s leading networking platform, delivering performance, scalability, and stability with the familiar manageability and control you expect from Cisco® technology.

The Cisco Nexus driver for OpenStack Neutron is capable of configuring Layer 2 tenant networks on the physical Nexus switches using either VLAN or VXLAN networks.

VLAN Programming

The Cisco Nexus Mechanism Driver (MD) for the Modular Layer 2 (ML2) plugin can configure VLANs on Cisco Nexus switches through OpenStack Neutron. The MD efficiently and intelligently uses VLAN ID assignment on switch ports by provisioning and deprovisioning VLANs across switches as virtual machines connected to tenant networks are created and destroyed. Moreover, connectivity from the compute hosts to the physical network is trunked to allow traffic only from the VLANs configured on the host by the virtual switch.

VXLAN Configuration

VXLAN is designed to provide the same Ethernet Layer 2 connectivity as VLAN, but with greater extensibility and flexibility. Hardware based VXLAN functions on the Nexus platform map VLANs tagged by the virtual switch on the host into VXLAN tunnels on physical switches. VLAN allocations are localized per switch, enabling tenant networks to reuse VLANs across switches.

Multi-homed Host Deployments

Highly available OpenStack network configurations are now possible using virtual Port Channels (vPCs). In addition to the standard Ethernet interfaces, the driver can also provision and deprovision tenant VLANs dynamically and efficiently on Cisco Nexus PortChannel interfaces.

Cisco UCS Manager Plugin

Cisco UCS Manager Plugin has three main functions.

·       Configure UCS Compute blades and managers with necessary VLANS.

·       Configure SR-IOV capable virtual functions and

·       Configure Cisco VM-FEX on SR-IOV capable NIC’s.

The UCS Manager Plugin talks to the UCS Manager application running on Fabric Interconnect. The UCS Manager is part of an ecosystem for UCS Servers that consists of Fabric Interconnects and IO modules.

The SR-IOV/VM-FEX feature allows Cisco and Intel (only SR-IOV support) physical functions (NICs) to be split into several virtual functions. These virtual functions can be configured in either the Direct or Macvtap modes. In both these modes, the virtual functions can be assigned to Nova VM’s, causing traffic from the VM’s to bypass the hypervisor and sent directly to the Fabric Interconnect. This feature increases traffic throughput to the VM and reduces CPU load on the UCS Servers. In "Direct" SR-IOV/VM-FEX mode, these benefits are the greatest with the limitation that live migration of the VM to a different Server cannot be supported.

The ML2 UCS Manager driver does not support configuration of UCS Servers, whose service profiles are attached to Service Templates. This is to prevent that same VLAN configuration to be pushed to all the service profiles based on that template. The plugin can be used after the Service Profile has been unbound from the template.

Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series delivers proven high performance and density, low latency, and exceptional power efficiency in a broad range of compact form factors. Operating in Cisco NX-OS Software mode or in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) mode, these switches are ideal for traditional or fully automated data center deployments.

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches offer both modular and fixed 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet switch configurations with scalability up to 30 Tbps of non-blocking performance with less than five-microsecond latency, 1152 10 Gbps or 288 40 Gbps non-blocking Layer 2 and Layer 3 Ethernet ports and wire speed VXLAN gateway, bridging, and routing

Figure 20    Cisco Nexus 9372 switch

Solution Design

The following sections give an overview of the hardware and software components used on the test bed, and few design factors to consider while making the system to work as a single highly available system.

Architectural Overview

The below figure shows the physical topology of the test bed and it has the following components:

Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Server

The director or undercloud node, controllers and compute nodes are on B200M4 blades. The compute nodes are evenly distributed across the pair of 5108 chassis. Each chassis has to host a minimum of one controller node. The director or undercloud node can be seated in any one of the chassis. The traffic flow through director node is minimal.

Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Servers

Cisco C-series rack servers provide the storage requirements to the OpenStack environment. However these are managed by UCS and hence are connected to Fabric Interconnects. We can leverage the full management capabilities of UCS Manager by hooking the storage servers to fabrics.

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and Cisco Nexus Switches

There is a pair of Fabric interconnects, which is standard per UCS design. Both the fabrics operate in active-active mode in addition to the inbuilt failover capabilities. Same applies to pair of Nexus switches. The Nexus switches operate in Virtual Port Channel (vPC).

IO Modules

IO Modules connect the chassis to fabrics.  These carry the FCoE traffic to the fabric interconnects.

Recommended Configuration

A minimum of 3 controllers, 3 storage nodes and 1 compute nodes are recommended to achieve High Availability in stack. More Compute or Ceph nodes can be added as needed. A full scale testing will be done with 3 fully populated chassis with Cisco UCS B200 M4 blades and with 10-12 storage nodes. The details of these configurations and test results will be included in the deployment guide.

Figure 21   Physical Topology

System Hardware and Software Specifications

The below table lists the Hardware and Software releases used for solution verification.

Table 10    Required Hardware Components

Hardware

Quantity

Firmware Details

Controller

Cisco UCS B200M4 blades

3

2.2(5)

Compute

Cisco UCS B200M4 blades

6

2.2(5)

Storage

Cisco UCS C240M4L rack servers

3

2.2(5)

Fabrics Interconnects

Cisco UCS 6248UP FIs

2

2.2(5)

Nexus Switches

Cisco Nexus 9372 NX-OS

2

7.0(3)I1(3)

Table 11    Software Specifications

Software

Version

Operating System

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

7.2

OpenStack Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform

RHEL-OSP 7.2

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack director

RHEL-OSP 7.2

Red Hat Ceph Storage

1.3

Cisco N1000V

VSM and VEM Modules

5.2(1)SK3(2.2x)

Plugins

Cisco Nexus Plugin

RHEL-OSP 7.2

Cisco UCSM Plugin

RHEL-OSP 7.2

Cisco N1KV Plugin

RHEL-OSP 7.2

Bill of Materials

Component

Model

Quantity

Comments

OpenStack Platform director Node

Cisco UCS B200M4 blade

1

CPU – 2  x E5-2630 V3

Memory – 8 x 16GB 2133 DIMM – total of 128G

Local Disks – 2 x 300 GB SAS disks for Boot

Network Card – 1x1340 VIC

Raid Controller – Cisco MRAID 12 G SAS Controller

Controller Nodes

Cisco UCS B200M4 blades

3

CPU – 2  x E5-2630 V3

Memory – 8 x 16GB 2133 DIMM – total of 128G

Local Disks – 2 x 300 GB SAS disks for Boot

Network Card – 1x1340 VIC

Raid Controller – Cisco MRAID 12 G SAS Controller

Compute Nodes

Cisco UCS B200M4 blades

6

CPU – 2  x E5-2660 – V3

Memory – 16 x 16GB 2133 DIMM – total of 256G

Local Disks – 2 x 300 GB SAS disks for Boot

Network Card – 1x1340 VIC

Raid Controller – Cisco MRAID 12 G SAS Controller

Storage Nodes

Cisco UCS C240M4L rack servers

3

CPU – 2  x E5-2630 – V3

Memory – 8 x 16GB 2133 DIMM – total of 128G

Internal HDD – None

Ceph OSD’s – 8 x 6TB SAS Disks

Ceph Journals – 2 x 400GB SSD’s

OS Boot – 2 x 1TB SAS Disks

Network Cards – 1 x VIC 1227

Raid Controller – Cisco MRAID 12 G SAS Controller

Chassis

Cisco UCS 5108 Chassis

2

IO Modules

IOM 2204

4

Fabric Interconnects

Cisco UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnects

2

Switches

Cisco Nexus 9372PX Switches

2

Cisco UCS Design

This OpenStack design on Cisco UCS, supports Cisco UCS B-Series blades B200M4 for Controller and Computes while C240M4 for Ceph Storage. This section of the document discusses the integration of each deployment into the design. The components of the Cisco UCS system offer physical redundancy and a set of logical structures to deliver a very resilient OpenStack compute domain.

The design defines two LAN port channels (Po11 and Po12) to connect Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects to the Cisco Nexus 9000. At the server level, the Cisco 1340 VIC presents four multiple PCIe devices to operating system.

Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders

Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders also knows as IO Modules operates as a remote line card to the Fabric Interconnect. Each Cisco UCS chassis is equipped with a pair of Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders. The IO-Module has Network facing interfaces (NIF), which connect the IOM to the Fabric Interconnect, and host facing interfaces (HIF), which connect the IOM to the adapters on the blades. All interfaces are 10Gb DCE (Data Center Ethernet). There are two different IOMs, each providing a different number of interfaces, 2208XP and 2204XP. Cisco UCS 2208XP has eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. The Cisco UCS 2204 has four external ports with identical characteristics to connect to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2208XP has thirty-two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the mid-plane to the eight half-width slots (4 per slot) in the chassis, while the 2204XP has 16 such ports (2 per slot).

The configuration used in the test bed was UCS 2204XP. However, depending the IO requirements UCS 2208XP can also be used. Pair of Cisco Fabric Extenders 2204XP carry 80Gb of traffic from the chassis to the fabrics. 2204XP enables 2 KR lanes per half-width blade slot whereas the 2208XP enables all four. Hence in discrete mode and with UCS 2204XP, each blade gets 20Gb of bandwidth with a overprovisioning of 2.

Table 12    Fabric Extender Model Comparison

Fabric Extender Model

Network Facing Interface (NIF)

Host Facing Interface (HIF)

HIF/Slot

2204XP

4

16

2

2208XP

8

32

4

Figure 22    Fabric Extenders 2208XP Connectivity with Half Width Cisco UCS Blades

Selection of the FEX, VIC and Mezzanine cards plays an important role in determining the aggregate traffic throughput to and from a server. Figure 23 shows an overview of backplane connectivity for both the I/O Modules and Cisco VICs. As shown in the figure, traffic aggregation differs depending on the models of I/O modules and VICs used. 2204XP enables 2 KR lanes per half-width blade slot whereas the 2208XP enables all four. Similarly number of KR lanes varies based on selection of VIC 1240/1340, VIC 1240/1340 with Port Expander and VIC 1280/1380.

Figure 23    UCS Block Diagram with 2204XP Fabric Extenders, VIC1340 and 6248UP Fabric Interconnects

MLOM Cisco VIC Interface Cards

Cisco VIC1340

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1340 is a 2-port 40-Gbps Ethernet or dual 4 x 10-Gbps Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capable modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) designed exclusively for the M4 generation of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers.

All the blade servers for both Controllers and Computes will have MLOM VIC 1340 card. Each blade will have a capacity of 40Gb of network traffic. The underlying network interfaces like will share this MLOM card.

Controller nodes will have PXE, Management, External, Storage Public, Storage Cluster and floating interfaces. The Compute Nodes will have PXE, Tenant and Storage Public Interfaces.

Figure 24    Cisco VIC 1340 Connectivity with IOM 2204XP

Figure 25    Cisco VIC 1340 Connectivity with IOM 2208XP

Cisco VIC1227

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1227 is a dual-port Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) 10-Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)-capable PCI Express (PCIe) modular LAN-on-motherboard (mLOM) adapter designed exclusively for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers.

The Ceph Storage nodes use VIC1227. VIC 1227 is a 20Gb Ethernet traffic adapter. Two interfaces one for Storage Public and another for Storage Cluster is configured on Ceph Storage nodes.

Figure 26    Cisco VIC 1227

Fabric Failover for Ethernet

Each adapter in Cisco UCS is a dual-port adapter that connects to both fabrics (A and B). The two fabrics in Cisco UCS provide failover protection in the event of planned or unplanned component downtime in one of the fabrics. Typically, host software such as NIC teaming for Ethernet, or multipath I/O (MPIO) for Fibre Channel provides failover across the two fabrics (Figure 27). A vNIC in Cisco UCS is a host-presented PCI device that is centrally managed by Cisco UCS Manager. The fabric-based failover feature, which you enable by selecting the high-availability vNIC option in the service profile definition, allows network interface virtualization (NIV)-capable adapters and the fabric interconnects to provide active-standby failover for Ethernet vNICs without any NIC-teaming software on the host.

Cisco UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnects each having 48 ports were used in the test bed. If needed this can be upgraded to Cisco 6296UP Fabric Interconnect as well.

Cisco UCS fabric failover is an important feature because it reduces the complexity of defining NIC teaming software for failover on the host. It does this transparently in the fabric based on the network property that is defined in the service profile.

Figure 27    Fabric Failover

Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects are connected with Cisco Nexus 9372 Switch as shown below. It is configured with two port-channels, one from each fabric to Cisco Nexus 9372 Switch. In a normal operating conditions only the North-South traffic is carried by the port-channels. However, in case of unexpected UCS IOM failures they may carry the data and storage traffic as well. Hence sizing the number of uplinks is important too. In this validated design, two uplinks from each fabric interconnect to the Nexus switches have been utilized for an aggregate bandwidth of 40Gbe (4x10Gbe). However, number of links can be increased based on customer throughput requirements.

Figure 28    Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches with vPC Configuration

In this validated architecture, a pair of Cisco Nexus 9000 is deployed in NxOS standalone mode. Cisco Nexus 9000 related best practices are used in the validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 architecture. It is summarized as below:

·       Cisco Nexus 9000 features enabled

—    Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP part of 802.3ad)

—    Cisco Virtual Port Channeling (vPC) for link and device resiliency

—    Enable Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) for infrastructure visibility and troubleshooting

—    Interface VLAN for configuring the Layer-3 SVI interfaces for the VLANs designated for forwarding

·       vPC considerations

—    Define a unique domain ID

—    Set the priority of the intended vPC primary switch lower than the secondary (default priority is 32768)

—    Establish peer keep-alive connectivity. It is recommended to use the out-of-band management network (mgmt0) or a dedicated switched virtual interface (SVI)

—    Enable vPC auto-recovery feature

—    Enable peer-gateway. Peer-gateway allows a vPC switch to act as the active gateway for packets that are addressed to the router MAC address of the vPC peer allowing vPC peers to forward traffic

—    Enable IP ARP synchronization to optimize convergence across the vPC peer link

Cisco Fabric Services over Ethernet (CFSoE) is responsible for synchronization of configuration, Spanning Tree, MAC and VLAN information, which removes the requirement for explicit configuration. The service is enabled by default.

—    A minimum of two 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections are required for vPC

—    All port channels should be configured in LACP active mode

vPC requires a "peer link" which is documented as port channel 10. In addition to the vPC peer link, vPC peer keepalive link is a required component of a vPC configuration. The peer keepalive link allows each vPC enabled switch to monitor the health of its peer. This link accelerates convergence and reduces the occurrence of split-brain scenarios.

For configuration details, refer to the Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches configuration guides: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/switches/nexus-9000-series-switches/products-installation-andconfiguration-guides-list.html

Cisco Nexus 1000v

Cisco Nexus 1000v is deployed with OpenStack in high-availability mode. In HA mode, two VSM module in active/standby are deployed in two controller hosts. Figure 29 illustrates the deployment methodology.

Figure 29    Nexus 1000V Logical Topology

·       Cisco N1KV is deployed by injecting the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) and Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) into overcloud image file.

·       The configurable parameters like VSM IP, tenant interface details etc. are passed through a configuration file to puppet registry as part of overcloud install.

·       The VEM module gets installed on all Compute and Controller nodes.

·       The VSM modules are brought up on Controller nodes, one in Active and one in Standby mode.

·       N1KV High Availability is managed through Pacemaker service.

·       The N1KV mechanism driver is deployed as part of Overcloud install.

Cisco Nexus Plugin

Cisco Nexus Plugin is bundled in OpenStack Platform 7 kilo release. While it can support both VLAN and VXLAN configurations, only VLAN mode is validated as part of this validated design. VXLAN will be considered in future releases when the current VIC 1340 Cisco interface card will be certified on VXLAN and Red Hat operating system.

The plugin is installed as part of overcloud deploy by making the necessary configurations in a plugin yaml file. Once successfully deployed, the Nexus plugin takes the functionality of adding and removing the VLAN’s on nexus switches and it will be transparent to the tenant. The plugin directly interacts with OpenStack API’s without any intervention by the cloud provider or the tenant.

Cisco UCS Manager Plugin

The Cisco UCS Manager Plugin, very similar to the Nexus Plugin, is bundled in Openstack Platform 7 Kilo release along with the necessary UCS SDK. It is configured as part of overcloud deploy identifying the Compute and Controller hosts.

While the plugin has the rich functionality of managing the UCS servers, SR-IOV, VM-Fex etc only the VLAN management functionality is validated as part of the design. The next releases of OpenStack CVD’s might consider the other features.

The plugin adds global VLAN’s in UCS Manager and also to the VNIC interfaces of the compute hosts and is transparent to the end user. The VLAN’s are deleted as needed while deleting a tenant VM.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage Design on Cisco UCS

Planning Undercloud

One blade is allocated for the installer node. Also referred as Undercloud node, it includes components for provisioning and managing the OpenStack nodes that comprise your OpenStack environment (the Overcloud). It provides the orchestration, environment planning and bare metal system control.

Planning Overcloud

Controllers

Controller provides key services for controlling the environment. The solution recommends a minimum of three controllers deployed and distributed across the chassis. For operating the cluster in Highly Available mode three controllers are strongly recommended.

Computes

A minimum of one Compute is recommended in the solution. The solution is scalable upwards and more can be added as needed. The validation is done with 3 compute nodes on each chassis.

Ceph Storage Nodes

Ceph Storage Nodes provide Red Hat Ceph Storage. A minimum of 3 nodes are recommended for Ceph Nodes as well.  Solution recommends having three Ceph nodes with a replication factor of three. Cisco C240M4 servers with Large Form Factor are used in the test bed with a raw disk space of around 140 TB. Depending on the storage requirements, C240M4S, the small form factor servers also can be used in place of large form factor servers.

Panning Networks

There are several layers to the networking in the overall deployment: Undercloud provisioning, Overcloud operation, and virtual machine connectivity.

Under Cloud Networks

The Undercloud utilizes the Provisioning network for DHCP and PXE to deploy Overcloud nodes. The instance of Heat running on the Undercloud also uses the Provisioning network for orchestrating the Overcloud.

Over Cloud Networks

The Overcloud networks are connected to the servers that are part of the Overcloud. They provide:

·       Control traffic between the Highly Available controllers and the compute and storage nodes

·       Connectivity for tenant VM traffic

·       Object and Block storage traffic

·       External connectivity and Floating IP’s

Network VLAN Requirements

The networks used are on separate VLANs. In order to connect all the networks to the proper hosts, VLAN tagging is used to deliver more than one network per interface. Most of the networks are isolated subnets, but some will require a Layer 3 gateway to provide routing for Internet or infrastructure network connectivity. Some networks can be delivered over tagged VLANs, but certain network types have restrictions or must be delivered over dedicated interfaces.

Internet access or provider network access is needed for Tenant External Networks in order to provide external connectivity to VM’s.

Network Topology

Figure 30 shows the Network Topology with the VLANs configured on the test bed.

Figure 30    Network Topology

The below table depicts the Network interfaces used in the test bed.

Table 13    Network Interfaces Used

Installer

Controller

Compute

Storage

PXE

Tenant

Management

Storage Public

Storage Management/Cluster

External

Floating

Network data within the cluster is segmented logically using VLANs. As part of instance creation, both UCSM and Nexus Plugins are called. UCSM plugin creates a global vlan on UCS Fabrics and also configures the VNICs on the compute host with the new vlan entry. Nexus plugin creates the VLAN on both the switches and appends entry to trunk allowed vlan to port channels on the Nexus switches. The process is transparent to a tenant and will be handled by OpenStack and Cisco plugins.

The following is a snippet of tenant with two networks and 2 instances on each network from the test bed.

Figure 31    An Example Tenant with Two Networks Having Two Instances Each

High Availability Design with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Cisco UCS

The High Availability of the solution was validated with a set of test cases. The tests will include both the hardware failures from Cisco UCS and Service failures from OpenStack and Cisco Plugins.

Figure 32    Hardware Failure Test Cases – Validated in the Test Best

Use Cases for Dev Test

The solution was tested in the area of scaling, sizing, live migration, etc. based on the most common administrative use cases.

Live Migration

Live migration is crucial from operational perspective to ensure continuous delivery of services running on infrastructure. This allows in moving the running virtual machine from one compute node to another one.

The most common use case for live migration is host maintenance - necessary for software patching or firmware/hardware/kernel upgrades. Second case is imminent host failure, like cooling issues, storage or networking problems.

Live migration helps in optimal resource placement. Also, allows in reducing costs by stacking more virtual machines on a group of hosts to save power. What’s more it is possible to lower network latency by placing combined instances close to each other. Live migration can also be used to increase resiliency by separating noisy neighbors.

This solution was verified for below functional test scenarios:

·       Move all virtual machines from one compute node to others

·       Possibility to invoke multiple live migration tasks in parallel

·       Live migration of image/volume-backed virtual machines with additional volumes attached

·       Honor affinity/anti-affinity policy during live migration

Capacity

Capacity defines the overall amount of resources which can be used to provision virtual machines. It includes logical CPU cores, memory and storage space. By using proper oversubscription ratio, number of virtual CPU cores can be higher than total available logical cores. This allows in lowering the operational costs by booting more instances due to the fact that average CPU utilization is usual lower than 100%.

This solution was verified for below functional test scenarios:

·       Spawn multiple virtual machines in parallel (both image/volume-backed).

·       Spawn multiple virtual machines with summarized number of virtual cores more than logical cores on compute node.

Scalability

Scalability is essential to increase number of available resources on running infrastructure in case it runs out of capacity.

This solution was verified for below functional test scenarios:

·       Possibility to provision additional compute nodes with OpenStack services installed.

·       Possibility to provision additional Ceph based storage nodes.

Summary

Cisco UCS Infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is an integrated solution for deploying OpenStack cloud and combines the value of Intel Xeon x86 architecture, Cisco data center hardware and software, and Red Hat's distribution of the OpenStack cloud platform. The solution is validated and supported by Cisco and Red Hat, to increase the speed of infrastructure deployment and reduce the risk of scaling from proof-of-concept to full enterprise production.

Cisco UCS hardware with UCS Manager Software brings an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain. Creating and cloning service profiles from its templates and maintaining the hardware from a single pane of glass not only provides rapid provisioning of hardware but also makes management and firmware upgrades simpler.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 with its automated deployment and management tool named Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director takes the OpenStack deployment to the next level by provisioning the Undercloud and overcloud deployments in an automated fashion. It provisions the nodes and networks, lays the bits, and hooks various components and other OpenStack services with minimal intervention. Built in Undercloud and overcloud dashboards provide most of the operational functionality to the Cloud Providers and Tenants.

This Cisco validated design is a partnership from Cisco Systems, Inc., Red Hat, Inc., and Intel Corporation. Combining these technologies, expertise and their contributions to OpenStack community and experience in the field, we are able to provide an enterprise ready solution for a robust private cloud deployment.

About Authors

Ramakrishna Nishtala, Technical Leader, Cisco UCS and Data Center Solutions, Cisco Systems

RamaKrishna Nishtala has around 20 yrs of experience in IT infrastructure, Virtualization and Cloud computing. In his current role at Cisco Systems, he works on best practices, optimization and performance tuning on Open stack and Storage solutions on Cisco’s UCS hardware.

Tushar Katarki, Integration Architect, Red Hat

Tushar Katarki is a technology professional with experience in datacenter, cloud and storage technologies. He is currently an Integration Architect at Red Hat driving cross product architecture and integration across Red Hat and partner products. Prior to the current role, Tushar has been a product manager and a developer at Red Hat, Oracle (Sun Microsystems), Polycom, Sycamore Networks and Percona. Tushar has an MBA from Babson College and MS in Computer Science from University at Buffalo.

Kamil Rogon, Intel

Kamil Rogon is a Data Center Engineer in the Intel Cloud Platforms Group. He is an Architect working on Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) in Poland. He brings systems administration experience of both traditional IT infrastructure and production Public Cloud usage. His effort is now oriented towards the enterprise readiness of Private Cloud solutions. He focuses on lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), improving end user performance, establishing high availability of hardware/tenants and increasing ease of use. Kamil collaborates with many outside companies (like Redapt, Rackspace, SuperNap) to drive industry changes. Known as a security and privacy paranoid, he believes that the automation of everything saves a lot of valuable DevOps time.

Acknowledgements

·       Cisco Systems: Bhanu Vemula, Brian Demers, Damien Zhao, Mohsen Mortazavi, Shanthi Kumar Adloori, Steven Hillman, Timothy Swanson,  Vijay Durairaj, Vishwanath Jakka

·       Red Hat: Guilherme Barros, Karthik Prabhakar , Mike Orazi; Steven Reichard

·       Intel: Arek Chylinski, Das Kamhout, Marek Strachacki, Pawel Koniszewski