[openstack-dev] [OpenStack-dev][HEAT][Windows] Does HEAT support provisioning windows cluster

Alessandro Pilotti apilotti at cloudbasesolutions.com
Fri Feb 21 16:44:30 UTC 2014


Hi guys,

Windows Heat templates are currently supported by using Cloudbase-Init.

Here’s the wiki document that I attached some weeks ago to the blueprint referenced in this thread: http://wiki.cloudbase.it/heat-windows
There are a few open points that IMO require some discussion.

One topic that deserves attention is what to do with the cfn-tools: we opted for using for the moment the AWS version ported to Heat, since those already contain the required Windows integration, but we’re are willing to contribute to the cfn-tools project if this makes still sense.

Talking about Windows clusters, the main issue is related to the fact that the typical Windows cluster configuration requires shared storage for the quorum and Nova / Cinder don’t allow attaching volumes to multiple instances, although there’s a BP targetting this potential feature: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder/blueprints/multi-attach-volume

There are solutions to work around this issue that we are putting in place in the templates, but shared volumes are an important requirement for providing proper support for most advanced Windows workloads on OpenStack.

Talking about specific workloads, we are going to release very soon an initial set of templates with support for Active Directory, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint and IIS.


Alessandro



On 20 Feb 2014, at 12:24, Alexander Tivelkov <ativelkov at mirantis.com<mailto:ativelkov at mirantis.com>> wrote:

Hi Jay,

Windows support in Heat is being developed, but is not complete yet, afaik. You may already use Cloudbase Init to do the post-deploy actions on windows - check [1] for the details.

Meanwhile, running a windows cluster is a much more complicated task then just deploying a number of windows instances (if I understand you correctly and you speak about Microsoft Failover Cluster, see [2]): to build it in the cloud you will have to execute quite a complex workflow after the nodes are actually deployed, which is not possible with Heat (at least for now).

Murano project ([3]) does this on top of Heat, as it was initially designed as Windows Data Center as a Service, so I suggest you too take a look at it. You may also check this video ([4]) which demonstrates how Murano is used to deploy a failover cluster of Windows 2012 with a clustered MS SQL server on top of it.


[1] http://wiki.cloudbase.it/heat-windows
[2] http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831579
[3] https://wiki.openstack.org/Murano
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_CmrZfKy18

--
Regards,
Alexander Tivelkov


On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 2:02 PM, Jay Lau <jay.lau.513 at gmail.com<mailto:jay.lau.513 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi,

Does HEAT support provisioning windows cluster?  If so, can I also use user-data to do some post install work for windows instance? Is there any example template for this?

Thanks,

Jay


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