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
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
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?