A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Open Stack’s capabilities to support High Availability are very limited. If a virtual machine crashes, there is no automatic recovery. Clustering software seems a to be a great workaround to allow redundancy and implement High Availability (HA). Pacemaker is a scalable cluster resource manager developed by Clusterlabs. Its advantages are: Support of many different deployment […]
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.
On the 19th February the 2nd Swiss OpenStack User Group Meeting took place. One of the presentations was held on Ceilometer by Toni and Lucas from the ICCLab. They talked about the history, the current and future features, the architecture and the requirements of ceilometer and explained how to use and extend it. You can […]
The second swiss OpenStack user group (CHOSUG) was held. It was an excellent event so well attended that there was only standing room! A big thanks goes out to the organisers and sponsors (RackSpace, SWITCH and ICCLab). There was six presentations, 3 which were more detailed and 3 that were more lightning talks in nature. […]
What happens when a group of experts from the Cloud Computing space and the Mobile/Telco industry get together in a meeting room? Last week the first General Assembly Meeting for the MobileCloud Networking (MCN) project was held in Palermo, with over thirty experts joining forces for four days to deliver an excellent result. The ICCLab […]
Like us in the ICCLab, you have likely spent lots of time researching the best means to deploy OpenStack and you’ve decided upon a particular method (at the ICCLab we use foreman and puppet). You’ve implemented OpenStack with your chosen deployment plan and technologies and you now have an operational OpenStack cluster. The question you now have to ask is: “How do I test that all functionality is operating correctly?”
So you have a new shiny OpenStack installation! Within that installation you may have differing classes of hardware and so you wish to be able to organise those classes
To organise your OpenStack deployment there are two concepts currently available: Availability Zones (AZs) and Cells. These allow you categorise your resources within an OpenStack deployment and organise those resources as you see fit. These is a very useful feature in order to offer different types of the same service. For example you might want to offer a compute service that runs on SSDs or plain spinning disks.
In this article we’ll describe OpenStack Availability Zones (AZs) and OpenStack Cells. We’ll also show how each differ.
We (ICCLab and ZHGeeks) are pleased to announce the 2nd Swiss OpenStack Meetup. It will happen on the 19th of February in Zurich at ETH. If you’re keen and interested in attending then please register here. If you are interested in giving a talk then do give a shout out at the meetup site or simply message @OpenStackCH on twitter. Currently […]
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.