The OpenStack CISCO Edition is based on OpenStack Folsom. This version was announced at the OpenStack Grizzly Summit in October. From a look at the version control information it is clear that this release was focused on this announcement (commits started a few weeks before the summit). Documentation is available. The installer uses custom packages that are available here: ftp://ftpeng.cisco.com/openstack/cisco/
The “Edition” part really means that CISCO packaged up the publicly available code. No other claims or hints the “edition” means that code changes to make OpenStack “better” could be found. The relevant OpenStack code is the same as vanilla OpenStack.
There current deployed version is “2012.2~+cisco-folsom3”
The install requires a running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS box. In our tests we used vagrant to provide this “build node”.
The compute and controller nodes where deployed via Virtualbox on our test setup. As expected the whole out of the box install process is customised to run on Cisco UCS machines. This can easily be changed, though.
The documentation of the various options can be found in the Cisco Wiki.
The installation process starts with the “build-node”. The other nodes will be setup up via cobbler and puppet. They have to be configured via edits of the relevant puppet manifests. This is documented fairly well.
For a easy out of the box testing experience (e.g. in a virtual env) one could have provided better defaults in the manifest files.
The focus of this installer cleary was not a smooth testing/try out experience but a marketing move to have something to show at the Summit.
After configuration of the puppet manifests and boot of the nodes the installation is fully automatic. However, we weren’t able to get the compute node set up to run. Also, the nova dashboard was not running at the end of the install process on the controller node. The other Nova services did run and responded to API requests.
A further investigation as to why this was the case has not happened yet due to the limited amount of time.
No pre-loaded images to start using OpenStack out of the box. Manual upload via Glance has to occur.
The Modules used in the installer are at https://github.com/CiscoSystems/folsom-manifests.
Interested in Cloud or Chef Trainings? Have a look at our Commandemy Trainings page. Need help migrating to the cloud? Check out Infralovers.
comments powered by Disqus