This is the first blog post in a series about running mixed x86 and ARM64 Kubernetes clusters, starting with a general architectural overview and then moving to detailed step by step instructions. Kubernetes doesn’t need any introduction at this point, as it became the de facto standard container orchestration system. If you, dear reader, developed…
One might argue what is the point in running a cloud infrastructure software like OpenStack on top of another one, namely the Azure public cloud as in this blog post. The main use cases are typically testing and API compatibility, but as Azure nested virtualization and pass-through features came a long way recently in terms…
In part 2 of this series about OpenStack on ARM64, we got to the point where our cloud is fully deployed with all the Compute (VMs), Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Storage (SDS) up and running. One additional component that we want to add is a Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS), which…
In the previous blog post we created the ARM OpenStack Kolla container images and we can now proceed with deploying OpenStack. The host is a Lenovo server with an Ampere Computing eMAG 32 cores Armv8 64-bit CPU, running Ubuntu Server 20.04. For simplicity, this will be an “All-in-One” deployment, where all OpenStack components run on…
This is the beginning of a short series detailing how to deploy OpenStack on ARM64, using Docker containers with Kolla and Kolla-ansible. The objective of this first post is to create the ARM64 container images and push them to a remote registry in order to be used later on, when deploying our OpenStack cloud. We…
ARM servers are more and more present in our day to day life, their usage varying from minimal IoT devices to huge computing clusters. So we decided to put the Windows support for ARM64 cloud images to the test, with two primary focuses: Toolchain ecosystem – Building and running Cloudbase-Init on Windows ARM64 Virtualization –…
Platform and cloud interoperability has come a long way. IaaS and unstructured PaaS options such as OpenStack and Kubernetes can be combined to create cloud-native applications. In this port we’re going to show how Kubernetes can de deployed on an OpenStack cloud infrastructure.
We’ve added support for RemoteFX for Windows / Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 back in Kilo, but the highly anticipated Windows / Hyper-V Server 2016 comes with some new nifty features for which we’re excited about! In case you are not familiar with this feature, it allows you to virtualize your GPUs and share them across…
Windows Server 2016 is gaining significant traction in OpenStack and other clouds, thanks to the support for Windows Docker containers and lots of other new features. While there’s no OpenStack Windows Server 2016 image directly available for download, the good news is that our automated build scripts will do all the work for you. All you need is a…
OpenStack is a great technology, but it can be a bit cumbersome to deploy and manage without the proper tools. One easy solution to address this issue is to deploy OpenStack services using pre-built Docker containers. Kolla is a set of deployment tools for OpenStack, consisting in the Kolla project itself, for generating OpenStack Docker images, and…
We’re getting quite a few questions about how to set the admin password in OpenStack Windows instances, so let’s clarify the available options. nova get-password The secure and proper way to set passwords in OpenStack Windows instances is by letting Cloudbase-Init generate a random password and post it encrypted on the Nova metadata service. The password can…
before reading the conclusions, we recommend to read the previous posts in this series if you want to know more details about the environment and the test scenarios: Introduction, Scenario 1, Scenario 2, Scenario 3. Conclusions It’s time to discuss all the results obtained so far. The table below show the average time expressed in seconds…
We have seen how to setup the benchmarking environment and two simple scenarios (Scenario 1, Scenario 2) in the previous blogposts of this series. This time we are going to add Hadoop to the mix to test a workload with significant memory, CPU and I/O impact. Scenario 3 The image used for this…
We talked about setting up the environment for benchmarking and we have seen in the previous part a simple OpenStack scenario. In this part we are going to continue by adding more complexity to the use case being tested. Scenario 2 In the second scenario a few intermediate steps have been added to increase the…
In the previous part of this OpenStack KVM vs Hyper-V compute benchmarking series we talked about how to setup the testing environment and how to run some scenarios. Time for some results! Scenario 1 To begin with, we started with a basic KVM vs Hyper-V scenario: Ask Nova to boot a VM Wait until Nova…
OpenStack Newton has been recently released. During this cycle we did quite some work on increasing the performance and overall reliability of our Windows and Hyper-V OpenStack compute drivers. This is the first post in a series where we are going to share some of our Hyper-V vs KVM benchmarking results for this OpenStack release, get…
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. It can be deployed on Azure, but also on-premise, thus making OpenStack a great choice for the latter. We are going to use Juju to deploy our Azure Service Fabric cluster directly on OpenStack…
OVS STT setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack
In this post we will explain how to configure manually a Open vSwitch STT tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts.
OVS GRE setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack
In this post we will explain how to configure manually a Open vSwitch GRE tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts.
OVS VXLAN setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack In the previous post we explained how to deploy Open vSwitch (OVS) on Hyper-V and integrate it into an OpenStack environment. In this second part we will explain how to configure manually a VXLAN tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts. KVM OVS configuration In this example,…
We’re excited to announce that our Coriolis cloud migration project introduced earlier this year just reached a new important milestone. With the addition of new features specifically aimed at business continuity and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Coriolis now offers both one-off migrations as well as constantly up to date replicas of virtual…
A Shielded VM is a Hyper-V generation 2 VM that has a virtual TPM, is encrypted using BitLocker and can only run on healthy and approved hosts in the fabric. It is protected from inspection, tampering and theft from malicious fabric admins and host malware, guaranteeing the security of the virtual machines running in an…
As you may already know, OpenStack Mitaka has been recently released. It has been quite an eventful cycle, full of new features, increased performance and overall reliability improvements on our Windows and Hyper-V OpenStack drivers. In this blog post, we’d like to present some of the most meaningful changes and updates that come with…
We are happy to announce the availability of Open vSwitch 2.5 (OVS) for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016 (technical preview) thanks to the joint effort of Cloudbase Solutions, VMware and the rest of the Open vSwitch community. The OVS 2.5 release includes the Open vSwitch CLI tools and services (e.g. ovsdb-server, ovs-vswitchd, ovs-vsctl, ovs-ofctl, etc.), and an updated version…
We’re very pleased to announce that starting with the Mitaka release we have introduced a new Openstack Nova Compute Driver, the Hyper-V Failover Cluster Driver, offering host based fault tolerance to tenants. The main advantage is that non high-available applications running in virtual machines can rely on the cluster for fault tolerance, a very common…
Migrating existing workloads between clouds is a necessity for a large number of use cases, especially for user moving from traditional virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere or Microsoft System Center VMM to Azure / Azure Stack, OpenStack, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. Furthermore, cloud to cloud migrations, like AWS to Azure are also a common requirement. Project Coriolis™ addresses exactly those…
There’s quite some documentation already available on how to run Windows Nano Server on Hyper-V or bare metal, but what about other hypervisors? Here at Cloudbase Solutions we often need to build images for different platforms, so why not automate the process in a simple way for all relevant scenarios, including, to begin with: bare metal,…
Nano Server is a new installation option for Windows Server 2016, reducing the overall footprint to just a few hundreds MB of disk space. The resulting deployed OS is thus way faster to deploy and to boot, reducing drastically also the overall amount of updates and reboots required during daily management. In short, it’s an OS built for a cloud age and huge leap forward compared to traditional GUI based Windows deployments.
Introducing the first fully Hyper-Converged Windows® server and OpenStack based cloud infrastructure that eliminates the need for expensive dedicated storage hardware, enabling distributed data across individual cloud servers. In this configuration all nodes have compute, storage and networking roles, increasing scalability and fault tolerance to new levels while drastically reducing the costs. Hyper-Converged…
OVS VXLAN setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack In the previous post we explained how to deploy Open vSwitch (OVS) on Hyper-V and integrate it in an OpenStack context. In this second part we’ll explain how to configure manually a VXLAN tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V hosts and VMs running on KVM hosts. KVM OVS configuration…
We are happy to announce the availability of the Open vSwitch (OVS) 2.4.0 beta for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016 (technical preview) thanks to the joint effort of Cloudbase Solutions, VMware and the rest of the Open vSwitch community. Furthermore, support for Open vSwitch on OpenStack Hyper-V compute nodes is also available starting with Kilo! The OVS 2.4…
Nano Server is a Windows OS created for the cloud age. It has been announced by Microsoft this April and is going to be shipped with Windows Server 2016. What makes Nano Server special? A very small disk footprint compared to traditional Windows Server deployments (a few hundred MB instead of multiple GB). A very…
Our OpenStack Hyper-V Compute Driver works with any OpenStack cloud, including clouds deployed using Mirantis Fuel. The goal of this article is not to provide a guide to deploy Fuel (for that you can use the excellent documentation from Mirantis), but rather to guide you through the process of adding a Hyper-V compute node to an existing Fuel…
The way people think about the enterprise IT is changing fast, putting into question many common assumptions on how hardware and software should be designed and deployed. The upending of these long held tenets of Enterprise IT are happening simply due to the innovation brought on by OpenStack and a handful of other successful open…
More and more people are interested in cloud computing and OpenStack but many of them give it up because they can’t test or interact with this kind of infrastructure. This is mostly a result of either high costs of hardware or the difficulty of the deployment in a particular environment.
As most of you may already know, here at Cloudbase Solutions we love to bridge the gap between Microsoft Windows and open source technologies, starting with OpenStack. Recently we’ve had the opportunity to get our hands on some pretty amazing open source hardware. We are talking about serious hardware that would make any cloud deployer sigh with…
Cloudbase Solutions has partnered with Spirent to build and release a suite of SaltStack states for deploying OpenStack, supporting Icehouse, Juno and Kilo releases, on multiple target platforms. These states are being enhanced and extended to also support OPNFV scenarios. Anyone wishing to collaborate on this parallel effort is welcome to join. It is recognized that…
Here at Cloudbase, we use a lot of Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) for our internal testing and development work. The NUC is a small form factor computer, designed and manufactured by Intel, very compact and powerful, sporting a Haswell i5 processor, up to 16 GB of RAM and a mSATA SSD. You can see…
Releasing stable components of a large cloud computing platform like OpenStack is not something that can be taken lightheartedly, there are simply too many variables and moving parts that need to be taken in consideration. The OpenStack development cycle includes state of the art continuous integration testing including a large number of 3rd party CI testing…
I’m very excited to announce the availability of the Open vSwitch porting to Microsoft Hyper-V Server beta release. This effort enables a whole new set of interoperability scenarios between Hyper-V and cloud computing platforms like OpenStack where Open vSwitch (OVS) is a very common SDN choice. The porting includes all the Open vSwitch userspace tools and daemons…
We’re very pleased to announce a new partnership between Cloudbase Solutions and Canonical for bringing Windows support in Juju and Maas. Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth showed a great demo of OpenStack integration with Hyper-V along with Active Directory, SQL Server and SharePoint Juju charms during the OpenStack summit keynote in Atlanta, providing a clear idea of…
FreeRDP-WebConnect is an open source HTML5 proxy that provides web access to any Windows server and workstation using RDP. The result is amazing, especially considering that no native client is required, just a plain simple web browser! Platform support HTML5 has came a long way in the last few years, with any major…
Putting together OpenStack and Puppet is a great way to satisfy almost any deployment scenario. There are a lot of resources on the web about how to set up such an infrastructure, but mostly Linux related. The main goal of this blog post is to provide a reference on how to deploy the Puppet agent on…
Following the recent announcement last Friday of the availability of OpenStack Havana release 2013.2.2, we’re glad to announce that the Havana 2013.2.2 Hyper-V Nova compute installer is available for download. Installing it is amazingly easy as usual, just get the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 / 2012 / 2012 R2 or enable the Hyper-V role on…
The usage of passwords is a common practice to authenticate users, but it becomes also a weak point when it comes to password distribution and management of a large number of servers, like for example in an OpenStack cloud (or any type of cloud, for the sake of it). Background: password-less Linux image deployments…
Here’s our second post in the RDO + Hyper-V series targeting Havana and automation. We had lots of great feedbacks about the first post, along with many requests about how to troubleshoot network connectivity issues that arise quite often when you configure a complex environment like a multi-node OpenStack deployment, especially for the first time! Although…
We get regularly a lot of requests about how to generate Windows OpenStack images, especially for KVM, where the proper VirtIO drivers need to be installed. This article provides all the step required to build one, as we did for the official OpenStack Windows Server 2012 R2 Evaluation images All the scripts are publicly available…
Our official OpenStack Windows Server evaluation images got updated to the freshly released 2012 R2 version just in time for the Hong Kong summit! Full support for OpenStack Havana is included for KVM and Hyper-V. We plan to release images for additional hypervisors as well quite soon (XenServer / XCP and ESXi / vSphere). The…
We are getting a lot of requests about how to deploy OpenStack in proof of concept (PoC) or production environments as, let’s face it, setting up an OpenStack infrastructure from scratch without the aid of a deployment tool is not particularly suitable for faint at heart newcomers 🙂 DevStack, a tool that targets development environments,…
Windows Server 2012 and Windows Storage Server 2012 offer an integrated iSCSI Target service that can be used with Cinder Volume in your stack. Being entirely a software solution, consider it in particular for mid sized networks where the costs of a SAN might be excessive. One of the great advantages of integrating Windows solutions…