Re: [Xen-API] Cloudstack or Openstack

[David Nalley <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Jane Wayne <jane.wayne2978@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Andrew,
>
> So, I'm going to get off topic (maybe, arguably, it's still within topic).
>
> Looking at the CloudStack website, they said the software is to manage
> a large number of virtual machines (VMs) as a cloud computing
> platform. What precisely does it help you manage?

The big things  CloudStack (and other IaaS platforms for that matter)
handle is that it provides multi-tenant isolation, deployment of a VM,
will handle network allocation (e.g. making sure a machine is on the
'right' network), Exposing complex networking to end-users (e.g.
provisioning load balancers, configuring firewalls, setting up VPNs,
provisioning isolated VLANs, and starting to have SDN capabilities),
managing High Availability (that's a marketing term, and I am sorry
that it's used, it essentially means to restart a VM which goes down
due to VM problems or host issues), along with a number of other
things. Essentially it's abstracting storage, networking, hypervisors,
and the fact that there might be other users using the same physical
resources away from the user.

>
> For example, I've been trying to find a technology to help build and
> support an elastic cloud computing platform (i.e. a Hadoop, HBase, or
> Accumulo cluster) with some significant level of automation involved.
> If I use XCP as the underlying virtualization platform, will
> CloudStack be able to interface with it to create an elastic,
> virtualized cloud computing (Hadoop) cluster for me?

You probably want to look at something like knife + chef
If you look at the knife-cloudstack plugin you'll see that there is
this idea of a 'stack' that will deploy multiple inter-related
machines - and the specific use case was for Hadoop clusters, and the
original authors tell me they deploy 50-node clusters at once, with a
single line. The readme is worth checking out.
https://github.com/CloudStack/knife-cloudstack

Puppet is another alternative, but there isn't a good alternative to
knife (there is puppet-cloud-provisioner, but it's not nearly as
flexible as knife, sadly)

Or failing that, something like Apache Whirr, which utilizes jclouds.

>
> What I've been doing manually is 1) create a VM and 2) configure a VM
> for each node I want to add to the cluster. Needless to say, this is
> time-consuming and error-prone. Could something like this be achieved
> with CloudStack (or OpenStack or OpenNebula)? The other day I read
> about another product, Eucalyptus, and I wonder how this fits into the
> picture; is this software meant to run on top of Xen, XCP, or both?

No, it's not really designed to run directly atop
Xen/XCP/$other_hypervisor IaaS platforms typically manage by API (so
XAPI/libvirt/vcenter API)

>
> I know I see diagrams on the XCP website/pages that says XAPI is
> exposed to 3rd party management tools. But it's difficult to say how
> these 3rd party tools are manipulating XCP and for what purposes.
>
> Do I need other technologies/software (i.e. Chef or Puppet)? Right
> now, there's too many options and too much marketing content I cannot
> really discern the products' capabilities.
>


HTH,

--David

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