Hi All:

I am kind of new to Openstack and want to setup openstack learning env or lab at home.

I have 3 HP MicroServers g8 with 16GB RAM and 5 HP MicroServers g7 with 8 GB RAM - all have dual or quad NIC and I have a 24 ports Aruba switch with VXLAN feature, older HP Procurve 24 switch.

I am looking into have 3 nodes for run services and 2 for compute and remaining 3 for Ceph.

Any advise on OS and which openstack distro I should and link to the documentations or guides? most common distros have good support for openstack at this point.

On Wed, 2022-02-02 at 17:07 +0000, Michael STFC wrote: there are several installers to choose form personally kolla-ansible is my prefered install openstack ansible might also be good for your scale but i have not used it much. triploe is proably overkill and i would not advise using it as your first into to openstack so assuming you are not going to use this for developing openstack kolla-ansible on debian or ubuntu with the source install option would be my recommendation it has pretty good support for centos too but i belive they are moveing to mainly using debain images for the contianers going forward so using a deb based host might have less issues openstack ansibale i belive also supports both the rpm and deb worlds so really you can pick your poision with regard to host OS. i would go with what you are most comforatbale with but ubuntu 20.04 is what most of our upstream ci uses if you are plannig t do developemnt i would use devstack but if you want this as a home lab to then run workload on i would use somethig else. for ceph cephadm is proably the way to go and you should be able to integrate a standalone ceph cluster with this deployment. kolla support external ceph and i suspect openstack ansible does too. one thing to note is i proably woudl proably also run the nova compute serive on the contolers to get the most out of the cluster. even with only 8gb of ram you can run a full contoler and have 1-2 GB of ram left over for vms so unless you decide to have the contoler also run ceph i would co locate the compute service on the contoler too if you do plan to have ceph and the openstack contolers coloacated then i would reuse the 3 nodes you planned ot dedicated fro ceph as computes. you certenly can have each system have a singel role but you can consolidate into a hyperconverd toplogy too.

Regards,

Michael

Hello Sean and Jean-François,

Thanks for your answers. I am getting myself into the world of Openstack and I have few questions on similar subject.

You mentioned that the development team is moving towards Debian images for containers for kolla ansible. Does it mean they will drop the support for CentOS 8 Stream in near future? i dont work on kolla any more but i belive there plan is to drop support for building container on centos-8-stream and only support debian as an image

On Wed, 2022-02-02 at 18:18 +0000, PAIPURI Mahendra wrote: base in the openstack AA release. centos should this be usable as a host os but the contaienr will jut use a differnt os internally. that is generally fine. currently you can use centos 8 stream for the contaienr base image but i knwo they dont plan to support centos 9 stream so when python 3.6 is nolonger supported next cycle kollas will have to drop suport for centos 8 images in anycase.

From my understanding, Openstack ansible can be deployed without use of linux containers at all. Did someone try this approach? Is it scalable and stable? The problem is we might have restrictions on using containers at our organisation. So, a container-less solution for deploying and operating Openstack would be very helpful for us.

i belive it can deploy with lxc/lxd container and without contianer yes. i think without contaienr is what vexhost use for there public cloud in the past althoguh it hink they have moved to use a k8s based operatro driven installs now. https://opendev.org/vexxhost/openstack-operator i think that is now what they use in production i do not have that much expirce wiht osa but i would not expect the non contaierised version to be any less scalable the the contaienr based approch osa does not use docker so there contaier based install is a singel app per contaier as far as im aware so they effectivly use the same playbooks to install the pacages in the lxc contaienr when using containers. its been about 2-3 years since i relly looked at how osa works so that could be out of date. if you have restriciton on using containers and you do not like ansible you could also look at the openstack puppet modules but i dont think they get much usage outside fo ooo so your milage will vary.

At what scale TripleO starts to pay off? We will have a cluster of 100-200 nodes soon and we will deploy Openstack on it. What would be a good deployment method for that scale?

unless you have a vendor support contract with redhat i personally dont think there is a scale where it beniftis you in a self support mode form rdo. that is just my personal opipion but ooo is very tied to the downstream redhat openstack product lifecyce for things like upgrades. since we only support fast forward upgrades in our product that is all the redhat contibute really spend type impleemnting and testign so if that does not work for you its not a good fit.

Thanks

Regards Mahendra

...

On 2 Feb 2022, at 18:44, Sean Mooney <smooney@redhat.com> wrote:

...

Hi All:

I am kind of new to Openstack and want to setup openstack learning env or lab at home.

I have 3 HP MicroServers g8 with 16GB RAM and 5 HP MicroServers g7 with 8 GB RAM - all have dual or quad NIC and I have a 24 ports Aruba switch with VXLAN feature, older HP Procurve 24 switch.

I am looking into have 3 nodes for run services and 2 for compute and remaining 3 for Ceph.

Any advise on OS and which openstack distro I should and link to the documentations or guides? most common distros have good support for openstack at this point.

On Wed, 2022-02-02 at 17:07 +0000, Michael STFC wrote: there are several installers to choose form personally kolla-ansible is my prefered install openstack ansible might also be good for your scale but i have not used it much. triploe is proably overkill and i would not advise using it as your first into to openstack

so assuming you are not going to use this for developing openstack kolla-ansible on debian or ubuntu with the source install option would be my recommendation it has pretty good support for centos too but i belive they are moveing to mainly using debain images for the contianers going forward so using a deb based host might have less issues

openstack ansibale i belive also supports both the rpm and deb worlds so really you can pick your poision with regard to host OS. i would go with what you are most comforatbale with but ubuntu 20.04 is what most of our upstream ci uses

if you are plannig t do developemnt i would use devstack but if you want this as a home lab to then run workload on i would use somethig else.

for ceph cephadm is proably the way to go and you should be able to integrate a standalone ceph cluster with this deployment. kolla support external ceph and i suspect openstack ansible does too.

one thing to note is i proably woudl proably also run the nova compute serive on the contolers to get the most out of the cluster.

even with only 8gb of ram you can run a full contoler and have 1-2 GB of ram left over for vms so unless you decide to have the contoler also run ceph i would co locate the compute service on the contoler too

if you do plan to have ceph and the openstack contolers coloacated then i would reuse the 3 nodes you planned ot dedicated fro ceph as computes.

you certenly can have each system have a singel role but you can consolidate into a hyperconverd toplogy too.

...

Regards,

Michael

On Wed, 2022-02-02 at 18:48 +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:

On 2022-02-02 18:43:37 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]

...

if you have restriciton on using containers and you do not like ansible you could also look at the openstack puppet modules but i dont think they get much usage outside fo ooo so your milage will vary. [...]

It's my understanding that the OpenStack Cluster Installer in Debian uses packaged copies of those Puppet modules to perform configuration management. oh good to know.

i have heard good things about the debian installer but never used it and dont know of any large scale deployment but for me simple is always better then complex nad just using puppet or ansible with or without contaienr makes grocking what is going on and why its broken much simpler when somethign does go wrong. if im self support a cluster like a home lab or even a small lab for a company being able to understand what the installer is doing is high on my list.

Openstack-ansible supports a containerless installation. We test this in CI equivalently to the LXC containers deployment - note that these are machine containers - analogous to VMs, and not docker type containers. I would personally choose Ubuntu 20.04 as the OS - mostly due to the limited lifetime of python 3.6 which you might find elsewhere, plus the availability of a full set of upstream ceph packages which may be harder to find for some other distros. OSA has managed to provide long and heavily overlapping lifecycles for Ubuntu based deployments, see https://docs.openstack.org/openstack-ansible/latest/en_GB/admin/upgrades/com.... This is something you should consider when planning how you are going to manage and upgrade your deployment. The more overlap you have the more freedom you have to work around external factors such as your preferred ceph versions. The tools mentioned in this thread are not really "shrink-wrap" installers for OpenStack, only you can architect your deployment to meet your particular requirements for hardware, HA, storage and networking setup. This architecture has to align with what is possible with the deployment tools, and OpenStack in general. Check if the various tools provide a reference architecture you can start from. Take a look at the available documentation, and join the relevant IRC channels. Operators using OSA who join #openstack-ansible and be an active part of the community are the ones who gain the most value. Just my opinion - others may vary :) Jonathan.

From my understanding, Openstack ansible can be deployed without use of linux containers at all. Did someone try this approach? Is it scalable and stable? The problem is we might have restrictions on using containers at our organisation. So, a container-less solution for deploying and operating Openstack would be very helpful for us.