In the Stacks

Crucial Question: Deployment

OpenStack newcomers are confronted with a plethora of information relating to the individual components and will often feel like the proverbial duck in a thunderstorm. The predominant question is always the same: How can I roll out and operate a monster like OpenStack meaningfully? It quickly becomes clear that manual configuration, and manually installing the packages needed for OpenStack on each host, is not an option. After all, large OpenStack clouds will include hundreds of nodes, so messing around with them individually is ruled out.

The major manufacturers are aware of this problem and have come up with various solutions designed to make life easier for admins. SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical stand out from the crowd with tools for automatic OpenStack installation.

SUSE: Early Adopter

SUSE was one of the first companies to jump on the OpenStack bandwagon and for years has actively provided its SUSE OpenStack Cloud product; unsurprisingly, SUSE Cloud is based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). For its cloud, SUSE not only delivers packages for all relevant OpenStack services for SLES, but a deployment solution based on Crowbar, as well. Crowbar in turn relies on the Chef automation solution and supports bare-metal deployment.

New hosts in the setup rely on PXE to boot a basic system and for inventorying. Using the GUI, the admin then assigns roles that are tied to certain services from the OpenStack collection to a number of hosts. Finally, the admin defines the details of the setup and triggers the OpenStack rollout. SUSE Cloud offers a convenient starting point – if you are already used to working with SUSE.

Red Hat Deferred

Unlike SUSE, it took Red Hat a very long time to opt for a comprehensive OpenStack commitment, but then the Raleigh-based company started to pick up speed, hiring OpenStack developers en masse; today, it is a driving force behind the OpenStack development.

Dubbed Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP), this unwieldy-sounding product is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and comprises a variety of OpenStack-centered tools and utilities that facilitate the installation and the administration of the cloud solution for the user. The bundle includes a separate GUI along with Packstack, a component that rolls out OpenStack with the use of the Puppet automation solution.

In terms of core functionality, SUSE Cloud and RHOSP differ only by a few details. The decision in favor of one solution or the other will ultimately depend on whether you already have experience dealing with SUSE or Red Hat.