Speeding Up Infrastructure

Provisioning with CloudForms Jason Dillaman Principal Architect, Red Hat Nick Lane Consultant, Red Hat

Agenda

•Where do clouds come from?

•Cloud Compute Capacity Scale-Out

•DevOps Provisioning

•Demo

Where do clouds come from?

Lessons from the Wild

•Derived from real-world CloudForms deployments

•Driven by efforts to make I.T. more responsive to business needs

• Data center compute capacity scale-out

• DevOps provisioning

•Laying the groundwork for efficient Cloud capabilities

• It’s a journey

The Illusion of Infinite Capacity

• Insight into current capacity and utilization is required

•Converged infrastructure provides the foundation for automation

• Cisco/NetApp FlexPod one such example

• Not cost effective to support all possible infrastructure combinations

•Quickly (re-)allocate servers based on where they are needed

•Quickly (re-)allocate VMs based on where capacity is available

DevOps

•Collaboration between software developers and I.T.

• I.T. needs to expose the tools necessary for developer self-

service

•Goal is to reduce turnaround from weeks or days to minutes

• Eliminate the touch points where possible

• I.T. still needs to be able to enforce policy

•Right-sizing recommendations to avoid waste

CloudForms to the Rescue

•Red Hat CloudForms provides the glue to tie infrastructure

components together

•Repeatable patterns to help modernize and standardize

operations

•“Automate all the Things” *

• * within reason

Red Hat Cloud Portfolio

Red Hat CloudForms

Complete Cloud Service Lifecycle

Automated Provisioning

Delegated Operations

Intelligent Optimization

Demand- Driven Scaling

Scheduled Retirement

• Automated Provisioning

• Simple/Multi-Tier, Full Stack

• Self-Service, Service Catalog

• Delegated Operations

• Power Operations, Console Reconfiguration

• Intelligent Optimization

• CPU, Memory & Storage

• Demand-Driven Scaling

• Horizontal & Vertical Start/Stop or Provision/Destroy

• Scheduled Retirement

• Fully Automated

• Multi-Phase

Cloud Compute Capacity Scale-out

Requirements

•Rapidly provision racks of Cisco UCS blades for infrastructure

modernization

• Integrate with existing kickstart provisioning infrastructure

• Integrate with existing infrastructure for IP and DNS management

•Minimize the amount of pre-configuration required

Hypervisor Provisioning

•Focus is on RHEV hypervisor scale-out

• Cisco UCS, Infoblox DDI, and Red Hat Satellite

• Pattern can be applied to OpenStack Compute scale-out as well

•Scale-up and down with ease

• Admin initiated via the CloudForms service catalog

• Automatically initiated based upon utilization alert event

•Automation uses infrastructure tags and other heuristics to

provision

Workflow Initiation

CLOUDFORMS

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Role-Based Access Controls

Policy Enforcement

Approval Workflow

Intelligent Provisioning

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Example Service Catalog Item

Hypervisor State Machine

Infoblox DDI

•DNS and IP Address Management

• IP subnets are tagged with extensible attributes

• Location (IAD, RDU), Environment (DEV, TEST, QA, PRD), Service (Infra,

Tier 1-3), Network location (Internal vs DMZ)

•REST API or Perl library to locate available IP address, available

DNS name, and allocate a host entry

•Repeat if IP address / DNS name collision

Infoblox Workflow Details

Cisco UCS Manager

•Management of all hardware components in the Cisco UCS

•Servers are associated to Service Profiles

• Software definition of the server and is LAN and SAN connectivity

•Utilize Service Profile Templates to construct Service Profiles

• Avoids hard-coding configuration within CloudForms

• Associated with server pool to automatically allocate physical server on-demand

•REST API calls to create new Service Profile from Service Profile Template, control power state, and query status

Cisco UCS Manager Workflow Details

Red Hat Satellite

•Responsible for provisioning and configuration management

• CloudForms can perform basic provisioning

• Re-use existing infrastructure

•Kickstart profile for RHEV-H or RHEL+KVM

•Activation keys to subscribe to correct channels

•XMLRPC calls to create new PXE provisioning request and query

status

Red Hat Satellite Workflow Details

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

•Newly provisioned hypervisors are connected to an existing

RHEV-M cluster

•CloudForms tags drive automation's selection of RHEV-M and

cluster

•Cisco UCS networks are mapped to RHEV-M logical networks by

VLAN or name

•REST calls to create new host, configure host networking and

power management, query status, and activate

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Workflow

CLOUDFORMS RHEV-M

Create Host

Get Install Status

Deactivate

Activate

Update Power / Nets

DevOps Provisioning

Requirements

•Need to transition existing applications to “cloudy”-like model

• Not feasible to leave existing software investment behind

•Automate the placement and installation/configuration of multi-tier

applications

• Integrate with existing infrastructure for IP and DNS management

•Minimize the amount of user-input required

DevOps IaaS+ Provisioning

•Bridge between IaaS and PaaS

•Multi-tier applications are tied together using CloudForms and Puppet

•Scale-up and down with ease

• End-user initiated via the CloudForms service catalog

• Automatically initiated based upon utilization alert event

•Automation uses infrastructure tags and other heuristics to provision

Workflow Initiation

CLOUDFORMS

RB

AC

Po

licy

Re

qu

es

ts

Role-Based Access Controls

Policy Enforcement

Approval Workflow

Intelligent Provisioning

Se

rvic

e C

ata

log

Example Service Catalog Item

Application State Machine

Red Hat Satellite & Infoblox

•Similar integration into Red Hat Satellite for VM provisioning and

Infoblox for IP address and DNS management

Puppet Configuration Management

•Stand-alone Puppet Master or Satellite 6 (Foreman)

•CloudForms assigns new VMs to host group representing

platform

•Override parameters as required based on service dialog inputs

•Discovery of peer VMs via Puppet manifest or injected by

CloudForms

•REST API for Satellite 6; Git or SSH+CLI for Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Workflow Details

CLOUDFORMS

Satellite 6 / Foreman / Puppet

Configure Host Puppet Settings

Application Stack

Retrieve Configuration

Demo

Summary

In Conclusion

•Real-world success with CloudForms IaaS+

•Embrace automation where feasible

• Avoid the repetitive tasks, eliminate touch points, expose self-service

•Goal is to design-in scalability to meet future needs

• Compute capacity

• Application horizontal scaling

•Welcome to the cloud model

Questions?