What's new in OpenStack 2014.2 "Juno"

Cinder

The Cinder block storage component (Figure 3) adds several new drivers, for example, for Datera, EMC, ProphetStor, and smbfs – the Samba file system. Additionally, Cinder now supports volume replication if the underlying storage technology can handle it.

Figure 3: A hot debate has flared up about a patch that extended Cinder to include an option for local storage. In Juno, this feature is certainly not yet ready.

Ceilometer

The developers have also made much progress with OpenStack's metering component Ceilometer, which now has much more extensive metrics. Traffic that runs through VPNaaS, LBaaS, or the FWaaS firewall solution can no longer escape the service's attentions. Additionally, Ceilometer can now use the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) to access machines directly, and it supports the Xen API for communication with Xen-based servers. In Juno, Ceilometer is seamlessly integrated with the deployment tool Ironic.

The performance of the service is also improved: In the future, Ceilometer will use multiple worker processes for writes to its database, rather than a single thread as before. As a result, it should be possible for the service to handle larger amounts of data. Little has changed with Heat, the orchestration component. The latest release adds only a few template features, which seem more relevant for niche setups than for most mainstream deployments.

Big Guns: Ironic

No later than in the next release, a piece of software that already many cloud admins desperately need will be promoted to an OpenStack core component. For the first time, Ironic will become a central part of the cloud solution. OpenStack thus has a bare metal deployment driver that lets you integrate new hardware directly.

Anyone who has ever used Ubuntu's MaaS, will find many familiar concepts in Ironic, because the driver lets you handle bare metal within an OpenStack cloud. When you bolt a machine into the rack, Ironic runs PXE and many other tools to ensure that the computer is treated to a complete operating system.

Officially, this process runs under the keyword of "bare metal provisioning." The process culminates in the installation of the actual OpenStack services that act as a cloud in the cloud. The functions that enable the automatic BIOS update of some brands or the correct configuration of RAID hard drives are really neat.