Scaling OpenStack with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

Transcription

Scaling OpenStack
with the Nutanix
Enterprise Cloud
Nutanix Solution Note
Version 1.0 • July 2016 • SN-2048
Copyright
Copyright 2016 Nutanix, Inc.
Nutanix, Inc.
1740 Technology Drive, Suite 150
San Jose, CA 95110
All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual
property laws.
Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Copyright | 2
Contents
1. Executive Summary................................................................................ 4
2. Introduction..............................................................................................5
2.1. Audience........................................................................................................................ 5
2.2. Purpose..........................................................................................................................5
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Overview.......................................6
3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Overview...........................................................................................6
3.2. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture...................................................................................... 7
4. OpenStack on Nutanix Architectural Summary................................... 8
5. Scaling OpenStack Deployments with the Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud....................................................................................................... 11
6. Enterprise Cloud Security.................................................................... 15
7. Monitoring, Analysis, and Capacity Planning.................................... 16
8. Conclusion............................................................................................. 18
Appendix......................................................................................................................... 19
References.......................................................................................................................... 19
About Nutanix......................................................................................................................19
List of Figures................................................................................................................20
3
1. Executive Summary
The integration of OpenStack technology and the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform delivers
a cost-effective, turnkey solution that offers on-premise infrastructure with the same simple
workflows usually reserved for public cloud deployments. With the fractional, cloud-like
economics afforded by the Nutanix hyperconverged architecture, enterprises no longer need
to over-provision storage for on-premise and hybrid cloud frameworks just to get started.
Furthermore, Nutanix design generates operational agility, with faster deployments and less time
spent on infrastructure planning and management.
As more enterprise workloads move to the private cloud, enterprise IT’s primary organizational
concern shifts from security to the resources and expertise that are available. Nutanix integration
with OpenStack means that IT teams can take advantage of a simplified approach to offering
centralized cloud services to the entire organization. With streamlined day-to-day services that
are easier to manage, administrators are free to focus on building and improving necessary cloud
governance capabilities.
Nutanix uses a defense-in-depth model to establish cloud infrastructure security as a core
competency. Nutanix integrates security into every step of the software development process,
including automated security testing. This approach incorporates security from code inception
without slowing development. At the same time, security-related changes are part of light payload
release trains that have minimal associated risk.
Deploying large-scale enterprise cloud platforms requires centralized management and visibility.
Nutanix provides Prism Central to manage multiple Nutanix clusters, no matter the hypervisor
type and geographical location, all via a single sign on (SSO). Centralized management negates
any need to log on to individual clusters to perform VM and storage resource monitoring or
to identify potential issues. Administrators can also automate such simple consumer-grade
workflows via REST and PowerShell toolkits.
The Nutanix commitment to uncompromising simplicity and efficiency translates into measurable
cost savings in terms of both CAPEX and OPEX. According to a recent IDC report, the Nutanix
solution provides
• 30 percent lower upfront costs.
• 90 percent reduction in on-boarding time.
• 70 percent reduction in operational costs.
• 70 percent savings in ongoing maintenance and support costs.
Deploying OpenStack on the Nutanix enterprise cloud reduces costs by bringing predictable,
high-volume workloads in house, while offloading potentially more costly, variable workloads to
the public cloud.
1. Executive Summary | 4
2. Introduction
2.1. Audience
This solution note is part of the Nutanix Solutions Library and is intended for administrators
responsible for architecting, designing, managing, and supporting Nutanix infrastructures.
Consumers of this document should be familiar with OpenStack technologies and Nutanix.
The document highlights deployment scenarios and addresses key items for a successful design
and implementation of OpenStack on Nutanix.
2.2. Purpose
This document covers the following subject areas:
• Overview of the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform.
• Architectural overview of the Acropolis OpenStack Services VM (OVM).
• How the Acropolis OVM integration simplifies scaling OpenStack.
• Monitoring, planning, and analysis with centralized cluster management via Prism.
2. Introduction | 5
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Overview
3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Overview
Nutanix delivers a hyperconverged infrastructure solution purpose-built for virtualization and
cloud environments. This solution brings the performance and economic benefits of web-scale
architecture to the enterprise through two product families—Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism.
Attributes of this solution include:
• Storage and compute resources hyperconverged on x86 servers.
• System intelligence located in software.
• Data, metadata, and operations fully distributed across entire cluster of x86 servers.
• Self-healing to tolerate and adjust to component failures.
• API-based automation and rich analytics.
Nutanix Acropolis can be broken down into three foundational components: the Distributed
Storage Fabric (DSF), the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), and AHV. Prism provides one-click
infrastructure management for virtual environments running on Acropolis. Acropolis is hypervisor
agnostic, supporting two third-party hypervisors—ESXi and Hyper-V—in addition to AHV, which
is built in.
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Overview | 6
3.2. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture
Acropolis does not rely on traditional SAN or NAS storage or expensive storage network
interconnects. It combines highly dense storage and server compute (CPU and RAM) into a
single platform building block. Each building block is based on industry-standard Intel processor
technology and delivers a unified, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture with no single points of
failure.
The Nutanix solution has no LUNs to manage, no RAID groups to configure, and no complicated
storage multipathing to set up. All storage management is VM-centric, and the DSF optimizes I/O
at the VM virtual disk level. There is one shared pool of storage that includes flash-based SSDs
for high performance and low-latency HDDs for affordable capacity. The file system automatically
tiers data across different types of storage devices using intelligent data placement algorithms.
These algorithms make sure the most frequently used data is available in memory or in flash for
the fastest possible performance.
Figure 2: Information Life Cycle Management
As part of the DSF, a Controller VM (CVM) writes data to local flash memory for fast
acknowledgment; the CVM also handles read operations locally for reduced latency and fast data
delivery.
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Overview | 7
4. OpenStack on Nutanix Architectural Summary
The diagram below details the means by which an OpenStack environment manages Nutanix
Acropolis clusters. The Acropolis driver stack translates OpenStack RPC calls into REST
API calls in order to communicate with the Acropolis clusters under its control. In essence,
administrators use the OpenStack controller dashboard, Horizon, to manage the Acropolis
clusters, which provide the underlying compute, network, storage, and image services.
Figure 3: Nutanix + OpenStack Integration Overview
The Acropolis clusters and their associated OpenStack controller are added to OpenStack
Services Virtual Machine (OVM). You can run the OVM on an Acropolis cluster or anywhere
within the datacenter. The OVM runs in one of two modes:
• All-in-One Mode: Nutanix provides a tested release of OpenStack, which is installed along
with the Acropolis OpenStack drivers in the OVM. Use this mode when installing from the
preconfigured QCOW2 image downloaded from Nutanix.
Note: All-in-one mode is perfect for testing automation and quickly spinning up a test
OpenStack environment, but Nutanix does not provide support for the OpenStack
controller in this mode.
4. OpenStack on Nutanix Architectural Summary | 8
• Driver-Only Mode: If using a remote or upstream OpenStack controller that is not installed as
part of the OVM, then this install contains the Acropolis drivers. The drivers are available as a
downloadable rpm package directly from Nutanix.
Once the OpenStack environment has control over the Nutanix Acropolis clusters, you must use
OpenStack to manage that particular enterprise cloud within your datacenter. However, you can
still use the Prism web console to monitor resources configured as part of the Acropolis clusters.
Figure 4: Nutanix + OpenStack Integration: Service Endpoints
In the architecture diagram above, we call out the Nutanix integration points for specific
OpenStack services. These are defined as API endpoints, used when the Acropolis drivers
redirect OpenStack service requests to the Nutanix REST API. We discuss the individual
OpenStack services the Nutanix infrastructure consumes below.
• Nova (Compute)
Nova is the compute engine and scheduler for the OpenStack platform. In an OpenStack
environment that includes Nutanix Acropolis clusters, each Acropolis OVM acts as a compute
host and each Nutanix cluster appears as a single hypervisor host eligible for scheduling
OpenStack instances. The Nova scheduler determines which compute host (Acropolis
OVM) to use based on the selected availability zone. The Nova scheduler then forwards
requests to the chosen Acropolis OVM, which in turn forwards the requests to the target
cluster's Acropolis scheduler. The Acropolis scheduler determines the optimal node within the
Acropolis cluster. Individual nodes within a cluster are not exposed to OpenStack.
• Cinder (Volume)
Cinder is the volume component for exposing iSCSI targets in an OpenStack deployment.
Cinder uses the Acropolis Volumes API. The volumes are attached to the cloud instances
directly as block devices, not as in-guest target devices.
• Glance (Image)
Glance is the image store for OpenStack and shows the images available for provisioning.
Images can include ISOs, disks, and snapshots. The image repo, which is hosted on the
Acropolis cluster, is the repository that stores the images published by Glance. The Glance
driver running on the Acropolis OVM publishes these images to the OpenStack controller. The
image repo spans all added Acropolis clusters, and images created through the OpenStack
interface propagate to all the clusters.
• Neutron (Network)
Neutron is the networking component of OpenStack and is responsible for network
configuration. The Acropolis OVM translates the network operations administrators perform
from the OpenStack dashboard to the corresponding network configuration changes in
Acropolis. Neutron assigns IP addresses to cloud instances when they are turned on.
Acropolis receives the allocated IP addresses, and when a VM sends a DHCP request, the
Acropolis master responds with an IP address over a private VXLAN tunnel.
5. Scaling OpenStack Deployments with the
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
When planning any large cloud deployment, enterprises must always consider how the
infrastructure will scale. Scaling your OpenStack deployment with the Nutanix enterprise cloud
platform means building out a hyperconverged architecture that is founded on three operational
pillars: the Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF), the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), and the hypervisor
component, AHV. Taking each of these in turn:
• The DSF provides storage features that are completely software defined, resilient, and
distributed, generating linear performance across all workloads.
• The AMF allows applications to run across hybrid cloud environments. Stakeholders can then
position applications based on their elasticity or predictability requirements.
• Nutanix lets you use any hypervisor—ESXi, Hyper-V, or AHV—but AHV is fast becoming the
security-hardened hypervisor of choice in cloud environments.
In traditional OpenStack environments, compute and storage nodes need to scale horizontally
from day one. The Nova compute service, the backbone of any OpenStack deployment, runs
compute instances (virtual machines) and by association orchestrates all workloads. Such
compute instances need persistent storage in the form of the block-based volumes the Cinder
service provides. Additionally, the Glance image registry needs storage for the OS base images
that Nova launches.
Initially scaling these services along with the required Neutron networking configuration is no
small task, and ongoing scaling remains just as challenging. The OpenStack integration services
that Nutanix provides address these pain points with characteristic simplicity. By exposing each
Acropolis cluster to the OpenStack software as an individual hypervisor host, the services scale
across all cluster hosts automatically. Enterprises can achieve additional scale-out by adding
more Acropolis clusters, each of which provides further compute, storage, and network services.
This level of scalability means that OpenStack can leverage the following high-level constructs
that allow specific instance placement on a per cluster basis (see the figure below).
• Availability Zones
Generally speaking, a specific geographic region that contains a site or datacenter is called an
availability zone. We can also break this concept down further: for example, we can consider
Acropolis clusters with distinct attributes, such as clusters in racks that are on different power
sources, to be in separate availability zones as well.
5. Scaling OpenStack Deployments with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud | 11
The Nutanix integration with OpenStack applies this concept to compute resource
provisioning. Distributing resources across different availability zones spreads the required
compute instances across separate clusters, thereby achieving higher availability.
• Host Aggregates
Host aggregates allow a cloud administrator to partition an availability zone or to logically
group preferred hosts that the Nova compute service uses for scheduling instances. These
preferred hosts may have particular storage capabilities or a specific set of images.
The Nutanix OpenStack integration services employ these constructs when Nova selects a
hypervisor node (an Acropolis cluster). At this point, the Acropolis management interfaces decide
on which cluster nodes provisioning should take place. With the current implementation of the
OpenStack drivers, this process provides load balancing and instance distribution across the
Nutanix clusters.
Figure 5: High-Level Overview of Availability Constructs
The following figure shows an example of scaling OVMs for a single site. OVMs contain no state
information, so they can scale easily. Having more than one OVM and using tools like Keepalived
and HAProxy to shift or share workloads between OVMs helps achieve OVM availability.
Figure 6: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Increasing Availability of Acropolis OVM
For larger deployments, Nutanix recommends connecting multiple Acropolis OVMs, abstracted
by a load balancer, to the OpenStack Controller. This configuration allows for higher OVM
availability as well as distribution of transactions.
In an environment spanning multiple sites, the OpenStack Controller talks to multiple Acropolis
OVMs across locations, as shown in the following figure.
Figure 7: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Cross-Site Deployment for Increased Availability
6. Enterprise Cloud Security
One of the biggest challenges in moving to an on-premise or hybrid-cloud model is enforcing
security and governance over applications. Hybrid clouds built from OpenStack and the Nutanix
enterprise cloud platform ensure security much like they do with public clouds, through a holistic,
end-to-end approach. This means that when you put an OpenStack on Nutanix system into
production, it immediately meets all security compliance objectives.
At Nutanix, we consider security a process rather than a product or service. Continuous,
automated security remediation means that hosting sensitive data and applications on the
Nutanix enterprise cloud enforces security throughout the technology stack. This ensures that a
Nutanix enterprise cloud deployment on OpenStack remains uncompromised over its life cycle.
As the foundation of this methodology, Nutanix security engineering incorporates a well-defined
Security Development Life Cycle (SecDL) into every step of the software development process,
from design and development to testing and hardening. Embedding security awareness into the
software life cycle ensures that every release of the Acropolis operating system (AOS) is secure,
without slowing down the overall development process.
Nutanix uses threat modelling to assess and mitigate customer risk from code changes. SecDL
testing is fully automated during development, and we time all security-related code modifications
during minor releases to minimize risk.
When new threats occur, Nutanix security and support teams are there to assess vulnerabilities
quickly and work with engineering teams to provide patches in days and weeks, not months or
years. Simplified patching through nondisruptive upgrades keeps systems online while removing
the attack vectors. Additionally, when scaling out your infrastructure by adding nodes, staying
secure has never been easier. Every new node runs the same hardened software, and you
manage these nodes using the same secure Prism interface.
6. Enterprise Cloud Security | 15
7. Monitoring, Analysis, and Capacity Planning
Nutanix provides a broad portfolio of tools for administering, monitoring, and analyzing the
clusters assigned to your OpenStack deployment. You can manage a cluster via a single Prism
graphical interface, Prism Element, and you can manage individual clusters in a multicluster
environment by registering them with a central interface, Prism Central. Nutanix deploys Prism
Central as a VM that allows administrators to easily track and control aggregated clusters, while
still providing the ability to drill down into each individual cluster.
Figure 8: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Centralized Management of Individual Clusters
The Prism interface also simplifies and streamlines common workflows for hypervisor, storage,
and VM administration. Prism enables end-to-end VM management, from creation, migration,
snapshots, and cloning to virtual network setup and nondisruptive hypervisor upgrades. Prism
also allows you to create automatically mounted datastores and apply storage policies and
behaviors such as compression, deduplication, and redundancy.
7. Monitoring, Analysis, and Capacity Planning | 16
With Prism, administrators can monitor precisely the data crucial to their business needs by
building customized visual dashboards with a range of views (VMs, storage, networking, and so
on) oriented to cluster-wide performance and optimization recommendations.
Recommendations for datacenter optimization come from patent-pending machine learning
algorithms used to predict future growth and consumption. Prism can accurately forecast just-intime capacity provisioning by using the entire spectrum of telemetric data available to it, which
can include millions of data points. Prism returns the best data models from within its large
collection for the desired time series and combines their forecasts.
The advanced machine learning techniques showcased in Prism provide the kind of business
intelligence required to capture highly accurate day-to-day operational insights. By using built-in
heuristics and data mining capabilities, Prism generates information for optimizing all aspects of
the datacenter infrastructure based on current usage, such as removing VMs that are no longer
in use and identifying overprovisioning. Prism can even process free text search terms and
return contextual results, as well as recommend specific hardware models to address a particular
upcoming resource shortfall.
Figure 9: Prism Features
7. Monitoring, Analysis, and Capacity Planning | 17
8. Conclusion
Provisioning the Nutanix cluster as the IaaS component of your OpenStack deployments
allows for turnkey datacenter deployments that simplify how you scale compute, storage, and
networking. The Openstack on Nutanix solution provides limitless scale, cloud-like fractional
consumption, and faster time to value. This simplicity extends throughout the stack, including
drivers. For existing OpenStack deployments, Nutanix provides a single driver package that
enables OpenStack to consume Nutanix cluster resources; we also provide a prepackaged open
source OpenStack configuration that works with the same driver distribution.
A Nutanix cluster integrated with OpenStack uses centralized Prism management to provide
the consumer-grade workflows that drive single-click hypervisor, BIOS, firmware, and software
upgrades. Prism’s machine learning algorithms apply software intelligence to capacity planning
and optimization, enabling just-in-time decision making for adding capacity and hardware,
managing overprovisioning, and remediating problems.
And finally, with Nutanix, such hybrid cloud environments don’t have to put your enterprise
assets at risk. Nutanix has already made security a top priority, handling within the platform the
concerns that drive security risk models and assessments. Simplicity, scalability, and security are
what set the OpenStack on Nutanix enterprise cloud solution apart.
8. Conclusion | 18
Appendix
References
1. IDC, Quantifying the Business Value of Nutanix Solutions: http://go.nutanix.com/nutanixpricing-vs-traditional-infrastructure-tco-roi-report.html
2. RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report: http://www.rightscale.com/lp/2016-state-of-thecloud-report
About Nutanix
Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that
power their business. The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform leverages web-scale engineering
and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualization and storage into a
resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable
performance, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application
mobility for a broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow up
on Twitter @nutanix.
Appendix | 19
List of Figures
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud................................................................................... 6
Figure 2: Information Life Cycle Management.................................................................. 7
Figure 3: Nutanix + OpenStack Integration Overview....................................................... 8
Figure 4: Nutanix + OpenStack Integration: Service Endpoints........................................ 9
Figure 5: High-Level Overview of Availability Constructs................................................ 12
Figure 6: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Increasing Availability of Acropolis OVM................ 13
Figure 7: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Cross-Site Deployment for Increased Availability... 14
Figure 8: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud: Centralized Management of Individual Clusters......16
Figure 9: Prism Features.................................................................................................17
20

Scaling OpenStack with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

Transcription

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