Open Stack

On 23 January 2014 03:53, Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin at mozilla.com> wrote:
> I've read a bit about bare-metal support in openstack.  It looks like Nova has decent support for it, with a few bugs, and Ironic's still in development[1].
>
> We at Mozilla have a bit of an unusual use-case, and I'm wondering how practical it will be to add support for it.  I'm sure there will be a decent amount of coding involved, and if those can be distributed as distinct plugins or upstreamed to OpenStack, all the better!
>
> The case is this: we have a bunch of typical commodity servers, a bunch of Mac Minis, and a bunch of development boards (Pandaboards, in particular).  We have tools in place for doing manual provisioning: IPMI for server power and IP-addressable power supplies for the Minis and Pandaboards, along with MDT for Windows, Kickstart for Linux (both PXE), Casper for OS X (Netboot), and a PXE-based custom solution for development boards[2].  Our DNS, DHCP, and network configuration is built from our internal inventory app[3], and wouldn't be handled directly by Nova.  We'd like to dynamically provision OS's onto all of this hardware, with the servers getting either Linux and Windows, the Minis getting various flavors of OS X, and the development boards getting various flavors of Android and Firefox OS.

Multiple architectures requires either multiple nova-computes with the
baremetal driver (each configured for one arch), or Ironic.

Windows is not yet a feature for nova-baremetal or Ironic, but we'd
love it to be :)
Ditto OS X.

DNS support in Nova - not sure of the current status but there was a
plugin interface at once point where you could query your inventory
app.

DHCP - you'll need to write a Neutron plugin to override the DHCP
allocation policy there.I suspect some refactoring will be needed.

Network configuration - model it in Neutron, should be straight forward.

> My hope is that we could add plugins that would glue OpenStack to some of the tools we're already using.  Is that practical?  Totally impractical?  Am I taking the wrong approach?  Will I be able to support all of these various backends in a single OpenStack instance?

Yes, one OpenStack region can handle multiple baremetal flavours,
which seems to be the only variation you have between the machines -
client OS is always a separate layer in OpenStack :)

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud