Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Tag: hardware

ICCLab Infrastructure Relocation

27. September 2012 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner


The relocation of the ICCLab hardware and the integration of 9 additional nodes is now complete. The whole movement was done within one day thanks to the support of Pietro, Philipp and Michael – Thanks Guys! Now our lab runs 15 compute nodes, 1 controller node and 1 NAS. We will segment this infrastructure to build a development environment including 10 nodes where we can develop and test our work on OpenStack and a production environment including 5 nodes for production purposes. As the next step we are will to redeploy OpenStack by means of automation tools Puppet and Foreman as was presented at the EGI Technical Forum. Let’s see how fast we can deploy 15 nodes from scratch! We’ll be studying, timing and evaluating it!

What’s Powering the ICCLab?

7. June 2012 / / 2 Comments

Here in the ICCLab, the framework of choice is OpenStack, which enjoys significant industry and academic support and is reaching good levels of maturity. The lab will support pre-production usage scenarios on top of OpenStack services as well as experimental research on OpenStack technology and extensions. Currently the actively deployed OpenStack services are the OpenStack compute service (including keystone, glance and nova), and Swift, an object storage service.

The lab is equipped with COTS computing units, each running on 8×2.4 Ghz Cores, 64GB RAM and 4×1TB local storage per unit. To store templates and other data there is a 12TB NFS or iSCSI Storage which is connected to the switch with a 10Gbit Ethernet interface. The Computing Units are connected to a 1Gbit network for data and another 1Gbit net for control traffic.

At the heart of the CCLab is the Management Server, which provides an easy way to stage different setups for different OpenStack instances (productive, experimental, etc.). The Management Server provides a DHCP, PXE and NFS Server and some pre-configured processes which allow a bare metal computing unit to be provisioned automatically, using Foreman, and then have preassigned roles installed, using a combination of Foreman and Puppet. This provides a great deal of flexibility and support for different usage scenarios.