NATIVE OPENSTACK MANAGEMENT USING UCSD

Technology

OpenStack is a free and open source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed  as IaaS, managed through a web-based dashboard, command line tools, or RESTful web  services. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity  established in 2012.

Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) is a heterogeneous platform for managing public, private and  hybrid cloud elements whilst providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) catalogue  functionality to the end user. UCSD supports a variety of hypervisors, as well as native  support for various compute, storage and network devices. UCSD provides policy driven  provisioning across bare metal and virtualized environments, including on hyperconverged  infrastructure.

Challenge

Our customer needed to natively perform OpenStack management operations  using the USCD (Cisco UCS Director) management interface. Traditionally,  OpenStack & UCSD integration is achieved via custom workflows using UCSD and

API calls. This approach, though highly customizable and effective, lacks the front-end  visibility of artefacts within the OpenStack hypervisor.

Unlike the native integrations with VMware, Hyper-V and AWS, the environment and the  hosted virtual machine cannot be viewed in the standard UCSD views. Because of this, point  and click lifecycle management (power-up, shutdown etc.) is not possible from standard  context menus.

Solution

Using the UCSD SDK, Metsi proposed a solution that adds OpenStack tenants into  UCSD, to perform operations on projects, instances, images and VMs. This  integration introduces a framework by which UCSD can natively perform  OpenStack management functions and lifecycle operations. Furthermore, the  ‘single pane of glass’ experience is maintained by extending the front end to keep  the hybrid cloud solution vendor agnostic. Metsi’s solution allowed our customer  to utilize UCSD to automate tasks in OpenStack, and view OpenStack resource  usage using UCSD.

Summary

Metsi provides Infrastructure as a Service design and implementation. In  designing IaaS, it is often necessary to integrate multiple tools and platforms in  order to achieve a truly centralized “single pane of glass” administration. Our  dedicated team of developers and engineers designs and implements centralized  IaaS management solutions, regardless of where the workload is.

Metsi not only provides the ability to extend your hybrid cloud into OpenStack,  but also to build the customized libraries to bring about the automation and  orchestration of the infrastructure components. For this scenario the UCS  Director SDK, CloupiaScript modules and orchestration workflows provide the  bedrock platform.

Metsi empowers our customers to streamline the business processes and  maximize return on investment by reducing complexity and delivering the  infrastructure to the user from a single portal.