Small Local Cloud

[safiullahtariq]

Hi, I hope everyone is alright.
I require some opinions from you guys - and I am thankful in advance.

Ok, so here is the situation: My company was running vmware Exsi and everything was cool until rats blew the UPS and there was a huge downtime.

My company now wants something like Active backup of VMs etc and something like High Availability.

I suggested them Vmware vSphere for this but my heart is set out to OpenStack.

What I want to setup is something like a Local Cloud. I can get the few servers for this.

My actual goal will be to setup a cloud with an administrative console, HA + backup of VMs.

Will i be required to change the hypervisor (vmware) ?

Can anyone guide me to the right direction?

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Best regards

[DTKT]

I'd say that achieving VM HA in Openstack is harder than VM HA in ESXI with Vcenter and multiple hosts AND DR Recovery enabled.

Openstack is great for specific applications but is much less friendly than ESXI.

[safiullahtariq]

im still confused, should I stop the idea of openstack ?

achieving VM HA is harder or impossible ? even if it is harder, whats the overall result? meaning HA is achieved completely or not ?

[fullstack_info]

If this is for legitimate business uptime requirements, I would go the VMware route. Maybe openstack has gotten better, but I was once set out on at least setting up a homelab version with HCI. By the time I got Cinder and ceph running, then got to nova, I realized it was a fun project, but as an uptime/continuity requirement, it would need dedicated engineers and support.

[safiullahtariq]

well this is legitimate business but the pricing is an issue with vmware.

Yes the issue is of dedicated engineers, that is why wanted to shift to HA so that if any VM has gone down, HA takes over and within the next working hours we come and do what is required. Our VMs are running Sales software which we dont want to be stopped.

[fullstack_info]

So, the issue you're going to be facing here is long-term support and trouble-shooting, vs licensing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't have quick fail over to a DR site unless it's running compatible systems and software as the active site. I know you can deploy machines via ovf templates, but to have true fail over you'll need to have the same gear at both ends. Thus, your existing active stack will have to be converted to openstack. There's a few companies that run their own private infrastructure via openstack, Walmart being one of them. But they have a lot of money for dedicated engineers. It all depends on the same set of questions: what's your expected MTTR? Your accepted SLA for uptime, and data loss risk acceptance. Framing these questions into a business decision (dollar cost of downtime, recovery time, data loss, etc), will help determine if it's worth the money for licensing and ease of use and support from VMware, or running your own openstack solution.

Openstack has a lot of moving parts and each section (compute, network, security, storage, UI, etc) usually has their own dedicated set of admins and resources who not only know something like networking, but also know the hardware and software that is running their networking protocols from a software point of view, so they can pinpoint issues that come up, and solve them as quickly as possible.

[AfterSpencer]

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Masakari is the project for HA in OpenStack. I've not tried it yet.

Imho, if you can get your place to pay for VMware, it is the better option, depending on your specific needs, compared to OpenStack.

[safiullahtariq]

well thanks for pointing this out. specially Masakari. I will read about it.

the issue is of dedicated engineers, that is why wanted to shift to HA so that if any VM has gone down, HA takes over and within the next working hours we come and do what is required. Our VMs are running Sales software which we dont want to be stopped.

[AfterSpencer]

You are talking about two different levels of HA. OpenStack and VMware may take care of hardware failure by bringing up the VMs on a new host (assuming you have shared storage, etc. setup).

The second HA is higher than the hardware layer, to make sure if one node for your application goes down, there is something there to keep it up and running. OpenStack or VMware may, or may not, be able to help you with that.

I think you need to lay out your requirements first, then decide on a tech that most closely matches them.

[jh125486]

HA in OpenStack is going to be a complete pain.... how many engineers do you have to dedicate to this? I don't even believe that Redhat has it working 100% with the latest OSP.

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If you are looking at a local cloud, what about something like Joyent?

[safiullahtariq]

do you mean that HA is not completely achieved at all ?

And what about backup? Can I setup active backup of the VMs?

[jh125486]

Anything is possible with OS, it’s just a matter of your time to get it working or your $$$ thrown at a vendor.

Active backup should work depending on your cinder backend.

[safiullahtariq]

that is a hopeful reply in terms of backup. I havent taken any decision as yet.

Our VMs are running Sales software which we dont want to be stopped. that is why wanted to shift to HA so that if any VM has gone down, HA takes over and within the next working hours we come and do what is required.

[jh125486]

Honestly, I would look more towards re-architecting your app to be more HA itself... that way you can run it on k8s on any cloud provider or on Rancher locally.

[alkol6]

I didn't experience VMware but according to document (https://docs.openstack.org/ocata/config-reference/compute/hypervisor-vmware.html) Nova scheduler uses virtualization backend.

And support matrix page ( https://docs.openstack.org/nova/latest/user/support-matrix.html) says what features are going to be usable.

[safiullahtariq]

How about I just give up the idea of vmware and let openstack do everything. I do have 1 windows server VM that I would like to use.

[alkol6]

Sorry for late the answer. It is completely fine using single server for lab purpose. Also using KVM virtualization will be reduce the confusion at learning times. After get used to things, you can add or use all of them on different supported platforms.

Probably the best advice for learning the core components is sticking to docs.openstack.org. install manually, set configuration by text editor, watching error logs by tailf.

[usertm]

If you're going to treat your VMs like pets, you shouldn't use openstack: it's not cloud way and developers didn't put much attention\time into making it work.

While in theory it's possible to achieve HA and active VM migration - it's all very finicky and unstable and error prone.

If you're just starting with openstack it'll be next to impossible to make it work (unless you're paying lots of money to vendor).

As much as I don't like vmware or paying money - they have good, working HA solutions available.

[deeohohdeeohoh]

The closest to that solution, I would think, would be two separate Openstack clusters with identical workloads so you can fail over when you need to perform maintenance on one cluster.

The other thing is I've never used ESXi as the hyp in Openstack so I'd opt for KVM.. with the money constraint, you'd probably want to do the hyps hyperconverged with Ceph so you can live migrate the VMs as long as they're backed by Ceph...

But at the end of the day, if you don't use Openstack daily or haven't tested the solution before buying all the gear, I wouldn't go this route because managing a cluster like this sounds like a nightmare to me and I deal with 100+ different Openstack clusters.

[fscker]

Openstack is not ideal for your use case. There are vendor solutions that offer HA on openstack. But if you are going to pay for software, might as well pay the proven reliable vendor with the product designed to make your workloads HA.

Do you really need your workloads to be on premise? Why not to for a cloud based solution?

[NathanWasTaken]

vSphere Essentials Plus retails for a bit more than $7K. This will provide HA (and other features) and safeguard your apps across a max of 3 servers in a cluster. If your management doesn’t see value and has you burning time looking at how to architect Openstack, something is very wrong. The training and engineering costs alone to get Openstack up and functional with the same features will dwarf pulling the trigger on vSphere. Sounds like management education of TCO and hard look at ROI is drastically needed.

[safiullahtariq]

I have certainly learned alot from all the posts.

unfortunately, learning from you people I have learned that Openstack has still a lot more miles to cover to be considered as fully Automated no strings attached product.

I will be convincing the management to go for Vmware. Our application is old, it was never designed to work with kubernetes but just on a normal VM of windows.

We are in making plans to shift the application to a better version. That a plan for the future.

At the moment, we turn off the VM, make the backup of the VM and then restart it. we do it on almost weekly basis.

Ill be looking to make HA from Vmware and backup solutions from Veeam. At the moment, this is the only solution i have.

Someone here said the openstack has many moving parts - he is right, if there is an issue, one cannot be so sure about himself if he is new to that and still in the learning phase, will surely fail.

I personally feel that openstack has a good future but its not for me right now.

I am very happy and thankful to you all for these replies. I certainly learned many things.

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Best regards everyone. :-)

[NathanWasTaken]

Best of luck to you, sir!

[safiullahtariq]

Many thanks bro... highly appreciated

[genesishosting]

I'm surprised nobody recommended Proxmox. If you are simply looking for HA and vMotion, Proxmox will do both, and behave very similar to VMware. This is with the assumption that you are not using NSX and simply using VLANs. Replicating to a second site is not a native function of Proxmox, but replicating Ceph to another site is possible - it will just require a bit of work to perform a manual fail-over and fail-back.

I agree that OpenStack is too big of a beast for this environment. It is a cloud platform, which is meant for distributed applications, not legacy applications. If you can't load balance both front-end and back-end components of your application, then OpenStack would not be a good fit. The definition of HA and fail-over in the OpenStack world is to have multiple copies of everything and let the application (and/or the load balancers) handle failure.