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I know this came up in the virtualization thread but I feel like it deserves its own thread. I do development and system administration at a small private college and I've been thinking a lot lately about what the future of our infrastructure will look like. OpenStack looks really nice on paper (multi-tenancy, HA via horizontal scaling, virtualized networking and storage as well as compute, etc), but I'm wondering how many people actually are able to use it in production. You can't really evaluate OpenStack without evaluating some of the deployment and orchestration tools used to stand it up, and this is where I'm hoping to learn from others' experiences. It seems each vendor has their own idea about how best to deploy and operate OpenStack. Since I have mostly Debian experience, I've looked at Ubuntu's tools so far. Ubuntu currently gives you two ways to install OpenStack, automagically via Landscape and somewhat more manually (though still highly magically) via their "Juju" tool. Both of these rely on their "Metal As A Service" (MAAS) package, which gives you a nice API for managing clusters of PXE booted servers. So far I've found that MAAS works mostly as advertised (quirks include poor detection of disks but this is getting better with every release); I'd probably use it whether or not I end up deploying OpenStack, just to make the bootstrapping of new physical machines easier. Juju, however, seems to have all sorts of problems that require manual cleanup, or even re-bootstrapping of entire machines and clusters. Is anyone using it in production? Has anyone successfully used it to deploy a production OpenStack cloud? I've yet to successfully bootstrap OpenStack with Juju, things inevitably break along the way. More generally, am I insane for looking at OpenStack without hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend? It seems to me that if the deployment tools were good enough, one could get a lot of the HA and management benefits even at relatively small scale. Or does its inherent complexity make that a gamble? Is it worth working with a vendor like Dell if we're trying to save money?
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Feb 16, 2015 23:46
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:07 |
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