[rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event

Wed Dec 5 23:47:52 UTC 2012

On 05/12/12 17:24 -0500, Daniel Dumitriu wrote:
>Hi,... everyone!
>
>Well, all this sounds very interesting...
>
>Because I am, actually, using Oz to create my images for Nova... Of
>course, that doesn't say much because it's, still, a manual process with
>no integration.
>
>Perry, this is how things may happen, eventually - and I could be wrong
>(I'm known to do that, a lot):
>
>- somebody (Oz ?) creates images for VMs AND kickstarts for physicals;
>- somebody (Foreman ?) provisions physicals;
>- somebody (Foreman ? Heat ?) manages server profiles (templates ?);
>- somebody (Nova with Glance) provisions VMs;
>- somebody (Heat?) manages/orchestrates the aggregation of
>  profiles (templates) and pushes them as schedules to Nova or
>  Foreman...
>
>Except... there's a lot of overlapping, which it is understandable,
>given the origins of each project.


Yea, there is a heap of overlap. All are trying to focus on something
a bit different.
- I believe Foreman is focused on baremetal (I am not up-to-date on the project tho')
- ImageFactory and Aeolus is focused on being cloud neutral
- Heat is focused on tight integration with OpenStack.

I have a bias (Heat developer:)
- With heat you _could_ (if you used bleading edge OpenStack) use OpenStack baremetal
   feature to deploy directly to baremetal (not vm's). (Some of our users are trying
   to get this to work).
- You definitely can use Puppet with CloudFormation templates:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/puppet-master-configuration.template
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/wordpress-via-puppet-client.template
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/wordpress-via-puppet-client-building-block.template

- One thing to add to this is Heat will do more than just provision
   the vm. You can setup a true Virtual application with networking,
   objectstore, volume, loadbalancer, autoscaling (soon DNSaas) resources.
   Current resources:
   https://github.com/openstack/heat/tree/master/heat/engine/resources

-Angus

>
>By the way, I keep insisting on Foreman because (despite the trouble I
>have with it) it holds the promise of a "real cloud": one that's not
>exclusively virtualized.
>Also it looks like it is the only one that's focused on managing Puppet
>configurations (though Heat might, as well).
>Data center operations it would be benefiting a lot from the
>streamlining of such an approach (IMHO).
>
>(And I am sooo sorry I cannot dedicate more time and effort to pushing
>this stuff forward - my day job, you know...)
>
>Thanks,
>
>Daniel
>
>-- 
>___________
>Daniel Dumitriu
>daniel at dumdan.com
>Telephone: +1-416-626-9345
>Mobile:    +1-416-318-2487
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Perry Myers <pmyers at redhat.com>
>To: Heron, Rodrique (CTR) WDC31 <Rodrique.Heron at cigna.com>
>Cc: daniel at dumdan.com <daniel at dumdan.com>, rhos-list at redhat.com
><rhos-list at redhat.com>, Ohad Levy <ohadlevy at redhat.com>, Ian McLeod
><imcleod at redhat.com>, Steve Loranz <sloranz at redhat.com>, John R. Dunning
><jrd at redhat.com>, Angus Salkeld <asalkeld at redhat.com>, Steven Hardy
><shardy at redhat.com>, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com>
>Subject: Re: [rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event
>Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:28:16 -0500
>
>Hi Rodrique and Daniel,
>
>On 12/05/2012 02:08 PM, Heron, Rodrique (CTR) WDC31 wrote:
>> I missed the event.
>
>It's actually just recorded presentations, and they are available for 90
>days I believe.  So you may still be able to register for the event and
>listen to the presentations for a while.
>
>> I am using Foreman, and it would be nice to use Foreman to build images and push them to glance.
>
>Right, so today Foreman just takes images that already exist and what
>you're looking for is a feature enhancement to Foreman that would
>integrate with something like Image Factory or Oz to build new VM images
>from source media and then push those images into Glance.  Do I have
>that right?
>
>> -
>> Rodrique Heron
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: rhos-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:rhos-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Dumitriu
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 1:54 PM
>> To: Perry Myers
>> Cc: rhos-list at redhat.com
>> Subject: Re: [rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event
>>
>> This is just a repeat of the comment/question I left in "The Lounge" of the Event:
>
>Apologies for not being in the lounge today to take the questions live.
> I had another commitment and couldn't attend.
>
>> ==
>> Thanks, Perry, for the OpenStack presentation.
>> Inciting, to say the least.
>> Question: At various points, you did mention "Heat" as an upstream
>> project. Could you be more specific on the provisioning side of
>> things ?
>
>It's a service similar to Cloud Formations in Amazon AWS.  It provides
>the ability to define a template that describes multiple VMs working in
>concert.  So you would define a template with 1 or more VM definitions,
>and then tell Heat to launch that template.  Heat then uses the
>OpenStack Nova APIs to launch the VMs in the proper order, waiting for
>things like dependencies in one VM before launching the 2nd.
>
>I've included some of the Heat folks on this thread.  I'm sure they can
>do better justice to your question than I could :)
>
>> It would be interesting, for example, to see what could happen if
>> "Foreman" would be used to "provision the Cloud". Especially for a
>> "private hybrid cloud" that includes both VMs and hardware servers.
>
>Foreman could definitely be used for both bare metal server provisioning
>for OpenStack core services and Compute Nodes while also being used to
>provision the VMs that will be in the cloud.  I thought that Ohad
>(Foreman creator/maintainer) had done some integration work (or maybe it
>was just planned) to better integrate Foreman w/ OpenStack from a guest
>provisioning perspective (using Fog as an abstraction layer I think)
>
>Ohad, any additional thoughts here?
>
>Perry
>