A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
This category is a collection of technical and scientific HowTos which describe how to do something, e.g. setup a Vagrant installation etc.
I assume you are confident using a shell, installing software and generally building software from source. While writing C code for a networking library I did some simple stability tests by setting up a simple server replying to a client query, no magic at all just hard coded strings. Obviously in such situations you will […]
If you ever tried to implement High Availability in OpenStack by using Pacemaker, you might be disappointed by Pacemaker’s extremely slow recovery speed. Pacemaker recovers OpenStack at a very low pace – and even worse: it sometimes detects outages when they do not occur. As a result Pacemaker starts unnecessary computationally intensive recovery actions which […]
How good was my last configuration change? The following article shows how to implement the “7-Step Continual Service Improvement”-Process for a cloud computing environment.
The ICCLab developed a new High Availability solution for OpenStack which relies on DRBD and Pacemaker. OpenStack services are installed on top of a redundant 2 node MySQL database. The 2 node MySQL database stores its data tables on a DRBD device which is distributed on the 2 nodes. OpenStack can be reached via a […]
Of all the IaaS software stack available, the one gaining rapidly in popularity is OpenStack. It has a huge community behind it and it enjoys support from several large IT vendors therefore ensuring a clear and long development and support roadmap ahead. Naturally it makes a logical deployment choice by numerous cloud vendors across the […]
ICCLab’s MobileCloud Networking solution is supposed to offer private cloud services to end users. MobileCloud is based on OpenStack. Since our OpenStack installation is supposed to be used mainly by end users, it is necessary to provide High Availability.
As mobile end users we all know that we want our IT services to be available everytime and everywhere – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. End users normally don’t reflect that this requirement is challenge for system architects, developers and engineers who offer the IT services. Cloud components must be kept under regular maintenance to remain stable and secure. While performing maintenance changes, engineers have to shut down components. At the same time the service should still remain available for the end user. Achieving High Availability in a cloud environment is a very complex and challenging task.
In our lab we have the need to have one environment which is running OpenStack Essex and another which is running OpenStack Folsom. Here’s a guide on how we setup our infrastructure so we can support the two environments in parallel.
Many people think it maybe an unnecessary burden to set up a monitoring system for their infrastructure. However this, when it comes to an OpenStack installation should be considered indispensable and required. Knowing which resources are used by which VMs (and tenants) is crucial for cloud computing providers as well for their customers from billing and usage perspectives.
This blog post aims to give you an overview over what RTI Connext DDS is, how it works and in which context it is used here at the ICCLab. Furthermore it shows you how to set it up and implement a simple HelloWorld-like application. It is not intended to explain details or specific concepts. For this you are kindly referred to the very abundant and well written documentation which comes with the product or can be found online.