Friday, June 26, 2015

SUSE® OpenStack Cloud 5 Admin Appliance – The Easier Way to Start Your Cloud

If you used the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 4 Admin Appliance, you know it was a downloadable, OpenStack Icehouse-based appliance, which even a non-technical user could get off the ground to deploy an OpenStack cloud. Today, I am excited to tell you about the new Juno-based SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 Admin Appliance.

With the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 4 release we moved to a single integrated version. After lots of feedback from users it was clear that no one really cared that downloading something over 10GB mattered as long as it had everything they needed to start an OpenStack private cloud. In version 5 the download is over 15GB, but it actually has all of the software you might need from SLES 11 or SLES 12 compute infrastructure to SUSE Enterprise Storage integration. I was able to integrate the latest SMT mirror repositories at a reduced size and have everything you might need to speed your deployment.

The new appliance incorporates all of the needed software and repositories to set up, stage and deploy OpenStack Juno in your sandbox lab, or production environments. Coupled with it are the added benefits of automated deployment of highly available cloud services, support for mixed-hypervisor clouds containing KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, integration of our award winning, SUSE Enterprise Storage, support from our award-winning, worldwide service organization and integration with SUSE Engineered maintenance processes. In addition, there is integration with tools such as SUSE Studio™ and SUSE Manager to help you build and manage your cloud applications.

With the availability of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5, and based on feedback from partners, vendors and customers deploying OpenStack, it was time to release a new and improved Admin Appliance. This new image incorporates the most common use cases and is flexible enough to add in other components such as SMT (Subscription Management Tool) and SUSE Customer Center registration, so you can keep your cloud infrastructure updated.

The creation of the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 Admin Appliance is intended to provide a quick and easy deployment. The partners and vendors we are working with find it useful to quickly test their applications in SUSE OpenStack Cloud and validate their use case. For customers it has become a great tool for deploying production private clouds based on OpenStack.

With version 5.0.x you can proceed with the following to get moving now with OpenStack.

Its important that you start by reading and understanding the Deployment Guide before proceeding. This will give you some insight into the requirements and an overall understanding of what is involved to deploy your own private cloud.

As a companion to the Deployment Guide we have provided a questionnaire that will help you answer and organize the critical steps talked about in the Deployment Guide.

To help you get moving quickly the SUSE Cloud OpenStack Admin Appliance Guide provides instructions on using the appliance and details a step-by-step installation.

The most updated guide will always be here

A new fun feature to try out in SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is the batch deployment capability. The appliance includes three templates in the /root home directory ( NFS.yaml, DRBD.yaml, simple-cloud.yaml )

NFS.yaml will deploy a 2 node controller cluster with NFS shared storage and 2 compute nodes with all of the common OpenStack services running in the cluster.

DRBD.yaml will deploy a 2 node controller cluster with DRBD replication for the database and messaging queue and 2 compute nodes with all of the common OpenStack services running in the cluster.

simple-cloud.yaml will deploy 1 controller and 1 compute node with all of the common OpenStack services running in a simple setup. 

Now is the time. Go out to http://www.suse.com/suse-cloud-appliances and start downloading version 5, walk through the Appliance Guide, and see how quick and easy it can be to set up OpenStack. Don't stop there. Make it highly available and set up more than one hypervisor, and don't forget to have a lot of fun.