Cisco and OpenStack: Juno Release – Part 2

The tenth OpenStack release codenamed Juno was released on October 16, 2014. This press release provides a good summary of what to expect in Juno. It also discusses important new capabilities included in the more than 340 new enhancements built in to Juno and highlights different usecases that showcase the diversity of workloads supported on OpenStack.

In the first part of the Cisco and Openstack Juno Release blog, I covered Cisco’s OpenStack team contributions to the Neutron project. Here I’ll provide details of our contributions to other OpenStack projects as well highlight our development efforts on StackForge. Cisco was the sixth top code reviewer for the Juno release across all projects in Juno release and is Foundation’s fifth largest company in terms of OpenStack membership.

This Nova blueprint was completed in Juno and provides support for configuration and provisioning of instances with SR-IOV port connectivity. The implementation generates SR-IOV specific libvirt domain and network configuration XML for the instances as well as includes the capability to schedule instances based on the compute nodes SR-IOV capabilities. One of the key use-cases for SR-IOV is Network Function Virtualization (NFV) that requires high performance traffic throughput in and out of a virtual machine providing network services (Virtual Network Function or VNF).

We proposed and implemented support for metering Network Services in Neutron using Ceilometer. This included new pollsters and notification handlers for Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS), Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) and VPN as a Service (VPNaaS). The metrics are categorized into Provider or Service Level, providing different level of details. Provider level metrics help determine the type of implementation and its feature, whereas the Service level metrics provide more granular metric details on the service health and consumption. Separately, instance metrics were enhanced as part of this blueprint to support read and write metrics per instance disk device.

In the Cinder project, Fibre Channel Zone Manager allows FC SAN Zone/Access control management in conjunction with Fibre Channel block storage. It has a pluggable architecture and we contributed the Cisco FC Zoning plugin that automates creation, deletion and modification of zones in zonesets. Zones are configured automatically as part of the active zone set for the specified VSAN in the FC SAN to provide a more flexible and secure way of controlling access.

Enhancements to Horizon to enable configuration of IPv6 subnet modes is also part of the Juno release. This allows tenants to configure address and Route Advertisement (ra) mode for their subnets through the user dashboard. Neutron supports multiple IPv6 address configuration modes including SLAAC and DHCPv6 (both Stateful and Stateless modes).

StackForge

The Cisco OpenStack team has been actively developing across different projects on StackForge as well. This provides an excellent platform for OpenStack related projects to make use of OpenStack project infrastructure and also continue to collaborate in the open.

OpenStack Services Puppet Modules – One of challenges that we hear about from our OpenStack customers is how to make OpenStack more manageable and deployable. There are several different deployment options for OpenStack and we have tremendous experience with automating the underlying system and service configuration via Puppet. We work with customers, partners and the community to enhance Puppet modules for OpenStack services and integrate with Cisco infrastructure as well. We also recently announced, in collaboration with RedHat, Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure that combines Cisco’s server, switching and management technologies with Red Hat’s enterprise-grade OpenStack platform.

Group Based Policy (GBP)– Currently staged on StackForge, this project aims to provide policy abstractions that extend the current Neutron API resources and introduces a declarative policy driven connectivity model that presents application-oriented interfaces to the user. The Group Based Policy framework implementation provides the flexibility for new API resources – End Points, End Point Groups, Contracts and Classifiers – that can be mapped to existing Neutron resources or passed directly to a third party controller. In addition to a mapping driver that supports all existing Neutron plugins, Cisco will also be releasing a driver to directly integrate GBP with its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller.

Nova Solver Scheduler – For resolving complex constraints based on policies and business rules, we have been collaborating with the community to develop a smart Nova Scheduler driver that models compute placement as a supply and demand problem. The intent is for the Solver Scheduler to integrate with the Gantt project that is aiming to separate out the Nova scheduler as a standalone project.

Summary

Cisco’s OpenStack team contributions are across numerous projects in OpenStack. Our aim is to work with the community, with our customers and partners to enable more successful OpenStack User Stories, resulting in a win-win situation. We are going to be presenting several general sessions that were selected as part of the community voting process at the upcoming Kilo Summit in Paris. You can find more details in this blog post and we look forward to seeing you there!

You can also download OpenStack Cisco Validated Designs, White papers, and more at www.cisco.com/go/openstack