I would like to use Ceilometer independently WITHOUT OpenStack to get usage data from VMWare vSphere installation.
Can anyone please guide me on this.
Ceilometer is designed specifically for Openstack and I don't think so it would fit for your usecase.
Ceilometer is designed specifically for OpenStack.
But for vSphere, there are only two tools that I know of (other than manually going through the data in vSphere) which is free and both have some limitations.
RV Tools from Roboware will allow you to get the utlization of the environment in excel sheet. Please do remember that it is a point in time snapshot.
You can also use products like Veeam one Free ... This only stores last 24 hours data.
Commercial solutions would include Veeam one, or VROps, or VM Turbo, etc.
Related
We have 24 Huawei CH242 V3 blade servers and want to setup a private cloud with OpenStack, but we're very new to OpenStack and very lack of experiences about infrastructures. Could somebody kindly give us some useful information about the following question:
What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?
Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?
What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?
Maybe some questions are very silly but we're really stuck on the first step, thanks in advance for any information.
Below is my suggestions and there can be more good answers too
What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?
You can try any Linux flavours (OpenSUSE/CentOS/Ubuntu) mentioned in the openstack official site. I personally used Ubuntu for installing openstack.
There are openly available JuJu charms that works on Ubuntu for installing Openstack services. So it will be easy for you to edit the charms and deploy.
Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?
I will prefer VM based installation from your list of choices. I personally suggest you to use containers to deploy your openstack services for better performance.
For compute service, you can go for bare metal installation, but it is upto you.
What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?
a. Try installing the same topology/setup as mentioned in the openstack documentation
b. Use recommended databases and AMQP brokers
What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?
I use CentOS7.2, its very stable for openstack. and Ubuntu is also stable which is tried.
Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?
Yes, I do like this, use bare machine as controller/compute/storage, performance good for me, I did not use container like docker.
What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?
Because you are new to openstack, I recommend you begin with install openstack, see more logs when you install it. read official website docs is necessary. but you need to notice there are also some errors in the docs, and the configuration also is not optimized, that is just for experiment of private cloud.
If you are skilled at install openstack, then you can read the source code on github, try to contribute the code for it, from fix docs typo.
I am beginning to study the use of virtual machines with realtime applications, specifically network applications.
While I do understand the limitations and concerns, I'd like to get ideas as to how to get started on this task.
I am going to use a DPDK sample application over Linux, and probably use VMWare for starters. However, I do not know what my first steps with respect to setting up VMWare should be.
First I think it is better to use open source solution like QUEM/KVM for your virtualization platform. Many platform exist for run high performance network functions on virtualized platforms you can see OpenNetVM for example in order to get basic ideas.
With OpenStack's architecture, is it possible to, for instance, have a PowerPC64 (Altivec) machine, a Intel CoreDuo machine, and a ARMv6 all on the same cluster?
Or is this impossible, because of the restrictions in building buildpacks when deploying to multiple architectures?
EDIT: Whoops, I meant OpenStack, not OpenShift ;)
The answer above is correct (answer from developercorey).
Although whether this suits you depends on how its managed and what your trying to achieve. Typically when you add servers with different physical attributes such as CPU, Disk, Network cards etc you group them into different host aggregates.
By default when you launch a VM it will try and find a suitable host, but you can also tag it, so for example if your VM required alot of disk IO, you might want to place it on a host that has SSD drivers. So you can put those hosts into a 'SSD' aggregate, and then when launching your VM you can make sure it goes to a host in that aggregate.
If your just trying to make the most out of the hardware you have, then I don't see any issue by mixing them.
I don't think that they have to be, but I do believe that they only build packages for 1 or 2 architechtures, so I'm not sure how many options you really have there.
I am a newbie with Xen.I want to know how does Xen work.
It's really a puzzle when facing the code and I don't know where to start.
Are there some easy articles for me?
Since you mention looking at the code, I assume you want to understand the technical details of Xen and not just merely how to start a VM.
As with all problems, start with something simple and then work your way up. Some pointers:
Be sure to have the prerequisite experience under your belt. In particular, strong C and Linux affinity, but also x86 paging and virtualized memory workings.
Make sure you have a sound grasp of the general Xen architecture. For instance, paravirtualized versus hardware-supported virtualization, the special role of the management domain (Dom0) compared to unprivileged domains (DomU), etc.
Investigate the the Xen components running in Dom0:
The Xen control library (libxc) which implements much of the logic relating to hypercalls and adds sugar around these (look in tools/libxc).
The swiss army knife for administrating Xen, namely the Xen light library (libxl). This library replaces the deprecated xm tool with the xl tool and takes care of all your maintenance tasks such as starting/stopping a VM, listing all running VMs, etc. For all these operations, it works in tandem with the aforementioned libxc. (Libxl lives in tools/libxl.)
The Xenstore is a tree-like data structure from which all running domains can retrieve and store data. This is necessary since all I/O goes through Dom0 (not the hypervisor!), and domains need to communicate with Dom0 how they are going to pass I/O along. (Look in tools/xenstore.) You can inspect the Xenstore with a tool such as xenstore-ls.
the blkback/netback kernel drivers which pass the data over shared channels to the VMs. (You will find these drivers in a recent Linux kernel (e.g. >= v3.0) that has so-called PVOPS support).
Take a look at the console daemon (tools/console). Note that sometimes the Qemu console is actually used. Qemu also comes in the pictures as a default backend for if you choose a file-backed virtual storage for a VM.
Experiment with the 'Xen-way' of inter-VM communication: Grant tables, event channels and the Xenstore. With these fundamentals you can create your own shared channel between VMs. You can do this, for example, with writing a kernel module that you use in two domains to let them talk to each other.
I can also give some pointers in the source that you can check out:
xen/xen/include/public/xen.h will give you a list of all the hypercalls with comments what they do.
xen/xen/include/xen/mm.h gives you an introduction to the different memory terminology used by Xen (i.e., real versus virtualized addresses and page numbers). If you don't grasp these differences, then reading the hypervisor code will surely be frustrating.
xen/xen/include/asm-x86/config.h gives an overview of the memory layout of Xen.
xen/tools/libxc/xenctrl.h exports a large list of interesting domain control operations, which gives an abstract view of task division between Dom0 and the hypervisor.
Last but not least, the book 'The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor' by David Chisnall comes highly recommended. It covers all these topics and more in a thorough, technical fashion with plenty of code examples.
The Xen wiki and developer mailing lists are also a great resource for understanding Xen.
If you have a more specific question, then I can give you a more specific answer.
Here are few links which will guide you with ZEN Start up.Hope they will be useful.
http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/virtualization/xen
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Category:HowTo
http://wiki.debian.org/Xen
For me, that is the best and more concrete tutorial with examples and step by step to start. I used it when I started.
Then you can read a lot more on Xen documentation itself or some books but as a starting point that allows you to easily install and test Xen, I choose that tutorial from Debian Wiki.
If you just want an overview, you may read this: http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Beginners_Guide.
This will introduce you to Xen hypervisor, suggest configuration to set up virtual machines, provide information about the networking and finally have details about tools for the management of virtual machines.
This documentation is to get the Xen specifically on ubuntu (Most importantly, it works!)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xen
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However, if you want to go to the next level and understand the working of Xen; Xen architecture, memory management, device management, CPU scheduling etc., I would recommend reading the book "The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor".
I'm no UNIX Guru, but I've had to set up a handful of slices for various web projects. I've used the articles on there to set up users, a basic firewall, nginx or apache, and other bits and pieces of a basic web server.
I foresee more slice administration in my future. Is there a more efficient way to set up users, permissions, and software on a clean slice than configuration by hand?
It sounds like you can create a new slice from the backup of an existing one. This might not work for you if the slices would be different sizes, different distros, etc. Their forums mention this: Clone a slice?
Depending on the number of machines you might find it makes sense to use something like CFEngine, or Puppet, to configure the new installs.
That brings your work down to configuring each new machine as a CFEngine, for example, client. Then that may be used to install the packages, edit files, & etc.
There are a few articles I wrote on the subject, with a Debian bias, here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/tag/cfengine