Openstack

Next week is the OpenStack Summit conference. I will attend and will be giving a talk How to Survive an OpenStack Cloud Meltdown with Ceph. See you there!

I just figured out that there hasn’t been much coverage on that functionality, even though we presented it last year at the OpenStack Summit.

Since Ceph Jewel, we have the RBD mirroring functionality and people have been starting using it for multi-site and disaster recovery use cases. The tool is not perfect but is rock solid, expect many …

Yes people, I’m still alive :). As you might noticed, I’ve been having a hard time to keep up the pace with blogging. It’s mainly due to me traveling a lot these days and preparing …

With the help of two colleagues, I’ve been busy writing this little book about storage in OpenStack. The book is quite general but gives some good perspectives on storage challenges you will …

Picture of our galaxy :). This picture describes the state of the integration of Ceph into OpenStack.

OpenStack Mitaka brought the support of a new feature. This feature is a follow-up of the Nova discard implementation. Now it is possible to configure Cinder per backend.

The summit is almost there and it is time to vote for the presentation you want to see :).

I have been waiting for this feature for more than a year and it is almost there! This likely brings us one step toward diskless compute nodes. This “under the hood” article will explain …

Configure a Nova hypervisor with more than one backend to store the instance’s root ephemeral disks.

With this article, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you all for voting for our presentation. It is always with a great pleasure that we will give you the last updates of Ceph …

Yet again and for the second time this year, it is time to vote for summit presentations :). Self promotion ahead :). As always, Josh and I will present the newest addition of Liberty for Ceph in …

It is possible to attach readonly volume to a virtual machine.

This feature is pretty old (introduced in the Havana cycle if I remember correctly), I just never got the chance to play with it. However I believe this feature could benefit to many users. …

Following my best Kilo’s additions selection, today I will be introducing the Glance image conversion. This feature was discussed at the last OpenStack summit in Paris, you can access the …

Kilo has been released last week. This blog post is the first of a series that will demonstrate some nifty new features. Managing cloud images life cycle is a real pain for public cloud providers. …

Bonjour, bonjour ! Quick post to let you know that my talk submission has been accepted, so I’d like to thank you all for voting. As a reminder, our talk (Josh Durgin and I) is scheduled …

One major use case for operators is to be able to reserve a certain amount of memory in the hypervisor. This is extremely useful when you have to recover from failures. Imagine that you run all your …

This feature has been around for quite a while now, if I remember correctly it was introduced in the Grizzly release. However, I never really got the chance to play around with it. Let’s assume …

Libvirt has the ability to configure a watchdog device for QEMU guests. When the guest operating system hangs or crashes the watchdog device is used to automatically trigger some actions. The …

Doing backups in the Cloud is not an easy task. In this article I will try to answer some frequently asked questions.

Self promotion ahead :) For the next OpenStack summit I have submitted two talks.

A while back, I wrote an article about taking consistent snapshots of your virtual machines in your OpenStack environment. However this method was really intrusive since it required to be inside the …

Only Magic Card player might recognize that post picture :) (if you’re interested) I have been waiting for this for quite a while now. Discard, also called trim (with SSD), is a space …

What’s happening under the hood while playing with Cinder and Ceph? Answer table :-).

For operationnal reasons, you might not want to automatically make your compute node available. With the following flag, during its first bootstrap the compute node will register itself to the service …

Just a reminder for me :D.

This method can be useful while migrating from one OpenStack to another.

Ceph, to work in optimal circumstances requires the usage of RAW images. However, it is painful to upload RAW images in Glance because it takes a while. Let see how we can make our life easier.

The OpenStack documentation often recommends to enable the Glance cache while using the default store file, with the Ceph RBD backend things are slightly different.

Since Juno, it is not possible anymore for an user to create public images nor make one of his images/snapshots public. Even though this new Glance policy is a good initiative, let’s see how we …

The next OpenStack summit is just around the corner and as usual Josh Durgin and I will lead the Ceph and OpenStack design session. This session is scheduled for November 3 from 11:40 to 13:10, find …

Save the date (September 18, 2014) and join us at the new edition of the Ceph Days in Paris. I will be talking about the new amazing stuff that happened during this (non-finished yet) Juno cycle. …

Computes with Ceph image backend and computes with local image backend. At some point, you might want to build hypervisor and use their local storage for virtual machine root disks. Using local …

Running OpenStack on production can be difficult, so every optimizations are good to take :).

Just back from the Juno summit, I attended most of the storage sessions and was extremely shocked how Ceph was avoided by storage vendors. However LVM, the reference storage backend for Cinder was …

Six months have passed since Hong Kong and it is always really exciting to see all the folks from the community gathered all-together in a (bit chilly) convention center. As far I saw from the …

Managing an OpenStack public cloud can be tough and building it properly is even harder. You can not predict the workload of your platform, customers do what they want (yes they pay for this!). So …

The Havana cycle introduced a QoS feature on both Cinder and Nova. Quick tour of this excellent implementation.

The summit was exciting and full of good things and announcements. We had great Cinder sessions and an amazing Ceph/OpenStack integration session. I’ve led the Ceph/OpenStack integration …

Ceph 17% ! :D

OpenStack has seen a lot of PaaS oriented project coming for the last few months. Heat, the orchestration service was introduced during Grizzly, Havana just got the support of the Docker hypervisor …

During this article, I am going to explain why I believe that CoreOS is an excellent operation system for your OpenStack controllers.

The Havana milestone release of the Horizon dashboard brought an absolutely wonderful panel for Heat, the orchestration service and Ceilometer, the metering service. Quick preview before the …

It has always been a huge pain to manage token in MySQL espacially with PKI token since they are larger than UUID token. Almost a year ago I wrote an article to purge token via a script. So finally, …

Recently I encountered a weird issue: the CPU load of my hosts was quite high with a load average of 20 and picks to 40. First, I had a look at the guest system since the high load was generated by …

With Grizzly came the instance evacuation but a quite recent addition to the code expended it to hosts.

Quick old tip (back from the cave) to trigger a live migration from a specific network card.

I recently had some really interesting questions that led to some nice discussions. Since I received the same question twice, I thought it might be good to share the matter with the community. The …

Next week is the OpenStack Summit conference. eNovance’s team will be present at the event. The convention is going to be awesome, I saw plenty of amazing sessions and I really look forward to …

Just started with Grizzly and already been through some minor issues :).

One of the most annoying thing is when the resolv.conf of your VM keeps changing because of the information sent by the DNSMASQ process. In this article, I assume that your setup has some conventions …

Availability zone in OpenStack. The main purpose of this article is to play a bit with availability zones.

Some tips for performing smooth maintenance in OpenStack.

Make consistent instance or volume snapshots.

I don’t want to see my logs poluted by INFO messages saying “hey, I’m running!”. No thanks, it burns my I/O cycles for nothing. If it doesn’t work I have a monitoring …

While waiting for the Ceilometer project to be ready, nova provides some facilities to retrieve simple statistics. A little overview about the available commands.

I couple of days ago I noticed that I never tested the overcommit capability in OpenStack

Short introduction to quota in OpenStack.

It can be really handy to auto assign floating IP addresses to every new instance.

Block migration, the best compromise possible?

Nova API metadata.

I wrote all the missing resource agents related to the nova ecosystem. All the RAs are available on my Github. All the ’nova’ RAs mainly re-use the structure of the resource agent written …

The purpose of this article is to achieve high-availability for some OpenStack components.

This article mainly re-uses the OpenStack official documentation. Since the latter has errors in it, I fixed them. It’s fully functionnal under Ubuntu 12.04 distro.

If you are running on OpenStack Essex, you should have some problem to delete a tenant.

Rabbitmq has his own buildin cluster management system. Here, we don’t need Pacemaker, everything is managed by RabbitMQ itself.

First article of a long serie to build an highly available OpenStack platform. This one is more a state of art about the OpenStack HA.