John Zannos
on 6 May 2015
Today’s cloud workloads are driving storage requirements at an exponential rate, making storage an important part of any OpenStack deployment. Clients are looking for a scalable cloud infrastructure that is able to take advantage of the features of advanced enterprise storage — but want to avoid the current complexity of creating and deploying those solutions. Canonical and EMC have created an easily modeled, swiftly deployable automation solution using Ubuntu Openstack, Juju and EMC storage solution platforms. Ubuntu OpenStack combined with EMC® VNX® and EMC XtremIO™ combined with a proven and tested Ubuntu OpenStack deployed by Canonical MAAS and Juju will help clients quickly and seamlessly build a scalable private cloud infrastructure.
According to the OpenStack User Survey, over 60% of production clouds today run on Ubuntu, many of whom have large requirements for enterprise quality storage. Reliable and automated cloud deployments enable clients to move with the agility and speed that is needed to take advantage of purpose fit storage solutions. Canonical is focused on providing that experience by providing modeling and deployment tools and building a complete ecosystem for OpenStack, with storage solutions being one of the most critical areas.
With Ubuntu OpenStack and EMC storage solutions, customers will realize the following benefits:
- A virtual infrastructure that can be modeled and repeatedly deployed very quickly
- Reduced operating costs
- Compatibility with multiple hardware and software vendors
- Increased cloud solution portability and agility because of reduced dependence on proprietary systems
Canonical and EMC have collaborated on an architecture for Ubuntu Openstack with EMC’s VNX and XtremIO storage arrays that illustrates the benefits mentioned above. This solution incorporates the following components:
- Ubuntu OpenStack
- Ubuntu Server OS
- MAAS
- Juju
- EMC VNX
- EMC XtremIO
- Cinder drivers for EMC VNX and XtremIO (part of Juno release)
- Charms for EMC VNX and XtremIO Cinder drivers
The architecture is an example of a small Ubuntu OpenStack deployment integrated with EMC VNX and XtremIO and deployed using MAAS and Juju. Scaling out this architecture to a larger deployment can be achieved by adding more compute or object storage units using Juju. In this architecture certain OpenStack components are deployed on the compute node. OpenStack services can be deployed on dedicated nodes for higher scalability or performance requirements. To achieve a higher level of performance this architecture segments storage traffic into a separate network interface.
OpenStack can be installed manually using packages on Ubuntu, but this might not be suitable for medium to large-scale deployments. For this reference architecture MAAS was used to manage bare metal provisioning of the physical servers and Juju Deployer was used for OpenStack service modeling and automation.
Juju provides a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) for automating the deployment of application topologies with Juju. It allows complex Juju service deployments to be declared (including constraints, relations, configurations, and resources) and deployed across any provider. More information about Juju Deployer can be found at launchpad.net/juju-deployer
The diagram below depicts the architecture used to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack with EMC storage systems and Cinder drivers. The deployment involves building an OpenStack environment with MAAS and Juju and integrating it with VNX and XtremIO using Juju charms (deployment bundles), as OpenStack management services.
EMC Storage Solutions with Ubuntu OpenStack – Architecture Guide
Canonical the market leader in OpenStack and EMC the market leader in storage together combine to supply this OpenStack solution. Expect more to come from the Canonical and EMC partnership at OpenStack Developer Summit in Vancouver!
