Category Archives: Storage & Virtualization

Hybrid cloud recent solutions from Microsoft and VMWare – 2 different ends of the hybrid cloud spectrum

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, DevOps & Automation, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , , , , , , , ,

Public clouds have grown tremendously over the last few years and there are very few companies who do not use public cloud at this point. Even traditional enterprises with in-house data centers have some presence in the public cloud. I was looking at Amazon’s re:Invent conference details and I was amazed by the number of new services and enhancements that were announced this year.  It is very difficult for private clouds to keep up in pace with the new features of public cloud. There is no doubt that public clouds will overtake private clouds in the long term. Private clouds still have a wide deployment and there will be enough use cases for quite some time to deploy private cloud. The use cases includes regulated industries, compute needed in remote locations not having access to public cloud and some specialized requirements that public clouds cannot meet. For some enterprises, private cloud would make more sense from a costing perspective. Having hybrid cloud option is a safe bet for most companies as it provides the best of both worlds. I saw 2 recent announcements in hybrid cloud that captured my attention. One is Azure stack that allows running Azure stack in private cloud. Another is VMWare cloud on AWS that allows running entire VMware stack in AWS public cloud. I see these two services as 2 ends of the hybrid cloud spectrum. In 1 case, public cloud infrastructure software is made to run on private cloud(Azure stack) and in another case, private cloud infrastructure software is made to run on public cloud(Vmware cloud on AWS). In this blog, I have tried to capture more details on these 2 services.

Hybrid cloud

There are predominantly 2 options currently to run Private cloud. 1 option is to use vendor based cloud management software along with hardware from same vendor.

Continue reading Hybrid cloud recent solutions from Microsoft and VMWare – 2 different ends of the hybrid cloud spectrum →

Experimental Docker with Docker machine

Containers & Kubernetes, Storage & Virtualization, , ,

Docker Experimental channel is used to release experimental Docker features so that Docker users can try the new features and provide feedback.  It is nice to use the experimental Docker in a test environment rather than upgrading Docker in the main development machine. The preferred approach is to use docker-machine and create a VM with experimental Docker. In this blog, I will describe the approach that I use to create docker-machine with experimental Docker VM. For basics of Docker machine, please refer to my blog on Docker machine.

Following are the steps needed to build the experimental boot2docker ISO and copy it to the docker-machine default location:

git clone https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker.git
cd boot2docker
docker build -t my-boot2docker-img -f Dockerfile.experimental .
docker run --rm my-boot2docker-img > boot2docker.iso
mv boot2docker.iso ~/.docker/machine/cache/boot2docker.iso

We need to specify Docker experimental release location in Dockerfile.experimental. In this case, it is https://experimental.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest.

Following command will start a Docker machine in Virtualbox with experimental Docker:

docker-machine create -d virtualbox exp

Following is the experimental Docker version running in my host:

$ docker --version
Docker version 1.11.0-dev, build 6c2f438, experimental

Installing custom software in boot2Docker image:
I had a recent usecase where I needed boot2docker to have ipvsadm installed. Package manager is not available in boot2docker. Other than installing ipvsadm, I had to copy few libraries. Following is my boot2docker.experimental file that I used for this usecase:

FROM boot2docker/boot2docker
MAINTAINER Sreenivas Makam ""

#DESCRIPTION use the latest experimental build of Docker

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y ipvsadm
RUN cp /sbin/ipvsadm $ROOTFS/sbin/
RUN cp /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnl-genl-3.so.200 /rootfs/lib/libnl-genl-3.so.200
RUN cp /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnl-3.so.200 /rootfs/lib/libnl-3.so.200
RUN cp /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpopt.so.0 /rootfs/lib/libpopt.so.0

#get the latest experimental docker
RUN cd $ROOTFS/usr/local/bin && curl -fL -O https://experimental.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-1.12.0-rc4.tgz && tar -xvzf docker-1.12.0-rc4.tgz --strip-components=1 && chmod +x $ROOTFS/usr/local/bin/docker* && rm docker-1.12.0-rc4.tgz

RUN echo "" >> $ROOTFS/etc/motd
RUN echo "  WARNING: this is an experimental.docker.com build, not a release." >> $ROOTFS/etc/motd
RUN echo "" >> $ROOTFS/etc/motd

RUN /make_iso.sh
CMD ["cat", "boot2docker.iso"]

Issue faced:
I was not able to use custom Docker image with docker-machine version 0.8.0-rc1. I could not find an option to prevent docker-machine from downloading latest Docker image. I have opened an issue here. The only workaround I found was to copy boot2docker image to ~/.docker/machine/cache/ , remove internet connection and then create docker-machine host.

References:

Baremetal cloud using Packet

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , , , ,

Typical Opensource demo applications comes packaged as a Vagrant application which starts a bunch of VMs and does automatic provisioning. I have a Windows machine with Virtualbox and VMWare player installed. Since Virtualbox does not support nested virtualization with 64 bit VMs(More details can be found in my previous blogs on Virtualbox and VMWare player), I use VMWare player to try out demo applications that needs 64 bit VMs. The demo applications typically run on Linux, so running them on Windows with Virtualbox is ruled out. I was recently trying this Mantl project for deploying distributed microservices and I found that it was very slow to run in VMWare player with nested virtualization. I tried to run the application in AWS and I found that AWS does not support nested virtualization(More details can be found here). Then I tried out Google cloud. Even though Google cloud supports nested virtualization, hardware virtualization is disabled on the guest VMs and this prevents running 64 bit VMs inside Google cloud VMs. After I ran out of these options, I stumbled upon the possibility of using baremetal cloud. I used baremetal cloud from Packet and it worked great for my usecase mentioned above. Though this is not a typical use case, I was very happy with the performance and the possibilities that this provides. In this blog, I will share the use cases for baremetal cloud and my experiences with using Packet service.

Bare metal cloud Use case

Typical cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Digitalocean, Microsoft rent out VMs as part of their compute offering. These VMs run on top of a hypervisor. Though the user is guaranteed a specific performance, these VMs share the same resources with other VMs running on the same host machine. With bare metal cloud, the cloud provider hosts machines that the user can rent which is not shared with anyone. Cloud providers provide different configurations for bare metal and the user can choose based on their performance needs and the costing is based on the performance provided by the bare metal server. Following are some advantages that bare metal cloud provides:

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Hashicorp Atlas workflow with Vagrant, Packer and Terraform

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, DevOps & Automation, Storage & Virtualization, , , , , , , , ,

I have used and loved Vagrant for a long time and I recently used Consul and I was very impressed by both these Devops tools. Recently, I saw some of the videos of Hashiconf and I learnt that Hashicorp has an ecosystem of tools addressing Devops needs and that these tools can be chained together to create complete application delivery platform from development to production. Atlas is Hashicorp’s product that combines its open source tools into a platform and it has a commercial version as well. In this blog, I will cover a development to production workflow for a LAMP application stack using Atlas, Vagrant, Packer and Terraform.

Overview of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Atlas

Vagrant

Vagrant provides a repeatable VM development environment. Vagrant integrates well with major hypervisors like Virtualbox, VMWare, HyperV. “Vagrantfile” describes the VM settings as well as initial bootstrap provisioning that needs to be done on the VM. Vagrant also integrates well with other provisioning tools like Chef, Ruby and Ansible to describe the provisioning. Simply by doing “vagrant up”, the complete VM environment is exactly reproduced. The typical problems like “it does not work for me even though its working in your machine” goes away.

Packer

Packer is a tool to create machine images for providers like Virtualbox, VMWare, AWS, Google cloud. Packer configuration is described as a JSON file and images for multiple providers can be created in parallel. The typical workflow is for developer to create development environment in Vagrant and once it becomes stable, the production image can be built from Packer. Since the provisioning part is baked into the image, the deployment of production images becomes much faster. Following link describes how Vagrant and Packer fits well together.

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Connecting VMs between Virtualbox and VMWare Player

Storage & Virtualization,

I had written blogs earlier on using Virtualbox and VMWare Player. I recently had a need to connect VMs running on Virtualbox and VMWare player. This is for my Windows laptop. I found the procedure mentioned in this link to be very useful. There are 2 options.

  1. Use bridged mechanism. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on Virtualbox and map it to 1 of the physical adapters. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on VMWare player and map it to the same physical adapter as Virtualbox. In this option, the connection between the 2 hosts is established through external router. It is possible that the router blocks this external communication. Even after clearing the firewall rules on the router, I was not able to get Virtualbox VM talk to VMWare player VM with this approach. I was able to get Virtual box VMs using bridged adapters to talk to each other, same with VMWare player. I feel that there is some filtering enforced either by Virtualbox or VMWare and I am not able to find the reason…
  2. Use host-only adapter mechanism. Create a host-only adapter on Virtualbox and create a networking interface on the VM and map it to the host-only adapter created. The host-only adapter can be configured with/without dhcp. Open “vmnetcfg” to map 1 of the VMWare adapters to bridged host-only adapter that was created with Virtualbox. I have captured details of  “vmnetcfg” in my VMWare player blog. On the VM with VMWare player, create a networking interface and map it to the custom VMNetx interface that was bridged to the Virtualbox adapter. After this, the 2 VMs will be able to talk to each other using the host-only network. This option does not have the disadvantage of dependency on external router and firewall.

References:

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator

DevOps & Automation, Networking & SDN, Programming, Storage & Virtualization, , ,

Earlier, I had written a blog on Cisco UCS automation using Python SDK. At that time, I used real UCS system to test my scripts. Cisco UCS PE(Platform Emulator) emulates UCSM(UCS Manager) software and we can run this as a VM. Different types of hardware(Fabric Interconnect, FEX/IOM, Servers, adapters, power supply) can be added to create a complex UCS system. We can do majority of the configurations and can trigger different conditions to see how UCSM reacts. Obviously, traffic related testing cannot be done with this. For scripting, UCS PE is a perfect solution. In this blog, I will cover what I did to get UCS PE up and running.

Environment:

VMWare Player 6.05 running on Windows 7.

Installation:

Download the PE zip files. I used version 2.2(3a). Unzip them and import into VMplayer. Choose the default configurations, 3 NAT interfaces are created by default.

Basic configuration:

Continue reading Cisco UCS Platform Emulator →

VMWare Player and VM Networking

Storage & Virtualization,

VMWare Player is the Virtualization software/hypervisor provided free of charge by VMWare. Player is for personal use. Paid versions are available as VMWare Player Pro or VMWare Workstation. Following link covers the differences between different editions. I have used Virtualbox for most of my VM needs. There were few recent scenarios where I had to use VMWare Player and in this blog, I will share some things that I learnt as part of this process.

Networking Options:

  1. Bridged – This is equivalent to the Bridged option provided by Virtualbox. This is present by default. VMnet0 is used for this.
  2. NAT – This is equivalent to the NAT option provided by Virtualbox. This is available as VMNet8 in the host machine and is present by default.
  3. Host only – This is equivalent to Host only option provided by Virtualbox. The difference is that only 1 network is present by default. This is available as VMNet1 is the host machine. To change the default subnet created, we need vmnetcfg utility.
  4. Custom – This is a variation of Host only option where we can create more networks and associate with VMNet2, 3, etc. This is not available by default and we need vmnetcfg utility to create custom networks.
  5. LAN Segments – This is similar to Custom network. Here, there is no host connectivity and no dhcp servers. Advantage with LAN segment is we dont have limit on the number of networks.

vmnetcfg utility:

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Openstack distribution

Cloud Platforms, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , , , ,

In the last few months, following were some acquisitions that happened: Cisco acquiring Metacloud, EMC acquiring Cloudscaling, HP acquiring Eucalyptus. Metacloud and Cloudscaling have Openstack based distributions, Eucalyptus has a cloud OS similar to Openstack. This set of acquisitions prompted me to look little closely at Openstack distributions and following blog is a result of this.

I see a close parallel between Linux and Openstack in terms of how they are evolving. Unix started off with various flavors like FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux etc. Linux is the dominant Unix version used now. There are different companies like Redhat, Ubuntu selling and supporting Linux distributions. There are currently different Cloud OS like Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, Openstack etc. Openstack is emerging as a major Cloud OS. There are different companies selling Openstack distributions currently.

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Storage Primer

Cloud Platforms, Distributed Systems, Storage & Virtualization, , , ,

Storage is a very critical component in the current IT domain. Choosing the right Storage platform and software is a critical part of a good Data center whether it is internal or external cloud. Even though I understood some Storage basics, I never ventured deep to understand the different storage technologies available. I tried to brush up my knowledge by doing some reading recently and I have tried to capture some of my reading in this blog.

Storage device(HDD vs RAID vs SSD)

HDD – Hard disk drive consists of a spindle with disks.

RAID(Redundant array of Independent disks) – Combines multiple HDDs to provide more reliability, throughput and capacity.

SSD – Solid state drive is a memory chip and it has no moving parts.

Storage device performance is measured in terms of throughput(data transfer rate), latency(time it takes to start a IO task) and IOPS(IO operations per second).  SSD scores better over HDD on all the performance parameters. RAID provides comparable throughput and IOPS as SSD, but SSD provides better latency. The only disadvantage of SSD is the much higher cost.

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Ansible for Network Automation – Part 2

DevOps & Automation, Networking & SDN, Programming, Storage & Virtualization, , , , , , , ,

This blog is part of my series on Devops for Networking. In the previous blog, I covered basics of Ansible and how to get started with it. In this blog, I will cover a sample application that I wrote with Ansible. This Ansible application builds on UCS sdk utility that I covered in a previous blog. The UCS python utility displays the inventory of UCS system. I have made that utility as an Ansible module and extended the application to display the inventory of a list of UCS systems that are defined in the host list. This project is more to illustrate the usecase for Ansible.

The source code for the project can be found here. There are 3 files listed here:

getucs.yml - YAML file that defines the playbook
getucsinfo - New module that is defined. This file needs to be in "usr/share/ansible"
getUcsProp.py - getucsinfo module uses functions in this library. This file needs to be in PYTHONPATH.The library provides utility functions to get UCS inventory.

Continue reading Ansible for Network Automation – Part 2 →