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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/14/13 9:22 PM, Scott Plante wrote:<br>
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<div>A lot was made about how hard OpenStack is to do on your
own--has anyone on the list done raw OpenStack? What was your
experience like? We tend toward making the free, open source
versions of things work for us. Then again, maybe we'd make
more money as a company if I didn't spend so much time playing
admin and concentrated on my paid programming work ;-). </div>
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<br>
I've deployed internal OpenStack clouds at my last job (deployed via
packages and our in-house puppetry) and these days I work for a
vendor doing OpenStack. So, some experience with it from both sides
of the checkbook as it were...<br>
<br>
When the vendors tell you OpenStack is "hard", what they're
referring to is a combination of several things:<br>
<br>
- OpenStack is really a framework more than a single product. It's a
family of several loosely coupled products that can be set up in a
myriad of different combinations -- and every user's install is
going to be unique to some extent. Some users will need object
storage (S3 in Amazon parlance) while others have no use for it, for
example; pretty much every at least quasi-relevant hypervisor is
supported; the number of networking configurations possible are
insanely long; etc<br>
<br>
- OpenStack is under very rapid development. The community and
vendors try to keep up but that means inevitably documentation is
trailing, and on the vendor side things like training programs are
just now starting to appear<br>
<br>
- The problem space OpenStack tries to handle is large. The dream is
that it's orchestration / abstraction for the entire data center. So
you're dealing with storage, servers, switches, routers, firewalls,
load balancers, etc -- and just about every possible vendor of each
type of component<br>
<br>
- Production deployments typically span dozens if not hundreds of
nodes, so the complexities of managing at scale also factor in<br>
<br>
- Because of the above items, OpenStack is severely
over-configurable. There are literally hundreds of configuration
parameters scattered across a couple dozen configuration files.
Although you won't have to set all for a deployment, you will even
for a relatively vanilla deployment touch many parameters in lots of
places, which means if you're doing this by hand you will likely
make mistakes and may get to spend some quality time in python to
figure out where you went wrong<br>
<br>
<br>
It's not really THAT scary to get going though and in fact some of
the large deployments of OpenStack track trunk continually, so it's
certainly possible to deploy in production straight from source<br>
<br>
<br>
If you're wanting to see a bit more there are a couple of relatively
easy ways to try it<br>
<br>
- devstack is a shell script that launches a complete OpenStack
environment. It's primarily meant to give developers a quick way of
deploying and testing, but it's also fine for getting your feet wet
and learning the different components of OpenStack and how they
interact. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://devstack.org/">http://devstack.org/</a> is the home page and has some
examples to get you going.<br>
<br>
- if you have some spare servers there are lots of guides to
deploying OpenStack in a relatively manual way over 2-4 nodes for a
more realistic test. Here's one that is reasonably good from the
community: <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/mseknibilel/OpenStack-Grizzly-Install-Guide/blob/OVS_MultiNode/OpenStack_Grizzly_Install_Guide.rst">https://github.com/mseknibilel/OpenStack-Grizzly-Install-Guide/blob/OVS_MultiNode/OpenStack_Grizzly_Install_Guide.rst</a><br>
<br>
In addition, most of the Linux distro vendors that are doing
OpenStack have guides for their own distro, like the Fedora one
here:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStack_on_Fedora_17">http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStack_on_Fedora_17</a><br>
<br>
- there are lots of vendors putting out "distros" of OpenStack which
simplify install. Many are open source, or have try-before-buy
versions available<br>
<br>
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