Category Archives: Storage & Virtualization

Cisco UCS automation using Python SDK

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

This blog is part of my series on Devops for Networking. In this blog, I will cover a brief overview of UCS management model, management tools and how to automate configuration and monitoring of Cisco UCS using Python SDK. UCS is Cisco’s Unified computing system that provides a tightly integrated compute, networking and storage solution.

UCS Management

Cisco UCS management information model is a hierarchical tree with each node in the tree representing either physical or logical entity. The node is referred to as MO(Managed object). Physical entities could be chassis, servers, switches and logical entities could be policies, service profiles etc. XML based interface is provided to set and get managed objects. Following picture shows a sample Management tree with Chassis, blades and adapters.

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Openstack Networking Demo

Cloud Platforms, Storage & Virtualization, ,

This blog covers a hands-on session demonstrating Openstack networking capabilities. This is a followup to my previous blog where I covered the Openstack Icehouse installation and basic usage. I have covered the following in the video.

  • Connectivity between VMs in a single subnet.
  • Connectivity between VMs across different subnets by having a router between the 2 subnets.
  • Connectivity between VMs across 2 different hosts and establish connectivity between the VMs using GRE tunnel between the 2 hosts.
  • Using Access security control policies to control access to VM.

VMs used are same as previous blog:

Controller localrc can be found here. Compute localrc can be found here. I had some issues getting connectivity across hosts working with network type vlan and vxlan. I am not clear if the issues are with the ovs switch version that I have or with the localrc configuration. Open vswitch version I am using is 1.4.6.

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Hybrid Cloud

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

In the recent Rightscale survey, 74% of the respondents mentioned that they have a multi-cloud strategy and 48% of the respondents are planning for hybrid clouds. The recent trend in Cloud computing after Public and Private cloud is Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud offers the best of Private and Public cloud in some scenarios and Enterprises seem to like that.

In this blog, I will cover the following:

  • What is Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud?
  • Use cases for Hybrid cloud.
  • Components of Hybrid cloud and design considerations – Cloud management, Network connectivity, Application portability
  • Popular Hybrid cloud providers – Rightscale and AWS, Vmware VCHS, Cisco Intercloud, Rackspace hybrid cloud, Redhat open hybrid cloud

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Network Virtualization – Openstack+ODL integration

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

In my previous blog, I covered basics of Network Virtualization and overview of commercial solutions available today. The most popular Open source Network Virtualization solution available today is Opendaylight. With the hydrogen release of ODL, ODL can be downloaded in 3 flavors: Base edition, Network Virtualization edition and Service provider edition. Network Virtualization edition adds components like Ovsdb, Opendove, VTN as well as Openstack integration. Ovsdb, Opendove and VTN are different approaches to provide multi-tenant networks. Ovsdb team has put in a nice set of hands-on tutorials for folks wanting to try out Openstack+ODL. I recently tried this out and I was very impressed. In this blog, I will cover my experiences in trying out hands-on Openstack+ODL integration.

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Network Virtualization – Overview and popular commercial solutions

Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , ,

In this blog, I will cover the following:

  • Overview and need for Network Virtualization
  • Relation between Cloud management and Network Virtualization
  • Network Virtualization approaches
  • Overlay Networks
  • Service chaining
  • Popular Network Virtualization solutions – Vmware NSX, Juniper Opencontrail, Cisco ACI.

Overview and need for Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization allows for abstracting the Networking resources into a logical/software model so that the same set of physical resources can be shared by multiple tenants in a secure and isolated manner. There are 2 kinds of Networking resources, one is the physical resources like Router, Switch and another is appliances like Firewall, Load balancer etc. The appliance can be either physical or virtual. NFV(Network functions virtualization) can be considered a subset of Network Virtualization.

Network Virtualization is similar to Server Virtualization. In server virtualization, compute resources are virtualized, while in network virtualization, networking resources are virtualized. Network virtualization took much longer time to come to the market compared to server virtualization. Following picture gives a good comparison between the 2.

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Cloud Infrastructure

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

In this blog, I will cover:

  • Major components of the Cloud infrastructure from hardware perspective
  • 2 models of deploying Cloud infrastructure
  • Overview of different converged infrastructure players and their solutions.
  • Deepdive into VCE converged infrastructure solution.

Major Cloud hardware components are Compute, Storage and Network. There are 2 models of building Cloud infrastructure.

  1. Build using discrete components.
  2. Buy turnkey solution called as Converged Infrastructure.

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Virtualbox and VM management

DevOps & Automation, Storage & Virtualization,

In 1 of the previous posts, I had indicated that its difficult to resize the VM hard disk that was created during VM creation. My friend pointed me to few links on how to do this. It turned out be pretty straightforward.

Also, I learnt that when we try different applications and different configurations in the VM, its very easy for the VM OS to be screwed up and it is necessary to either take snapshots, backups, clones and restore them to be on the safe side.

In this blog, I will try to cover some of the common tasks that we would need from VM management perspective like VM backup and restore, resizing VM hard disk. I will say this in the context of Virtualbox, lot of these would apply to other VM hosting software like VMware player, etc. Also, I will cover some things that I have learnt in Virtual box along the way..

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