Liberté
I usually write an upgrade report on our OpenStack version upgrades. We recently upgraded from Juno to Liberty. I haven't gotten to writing how it went, partly because it went so smoothly.
Disclaimer: The preparation and work behind this was mostly done by others than yours truly. Architecture-wise we still run monolithic . . .
Phish Vendors
We run a lot of servers. Sometimes they break, and you have to involve the vendor. I thought I'd write about a severe security issue with the support cases. This is probably well known for most people dealing with vendors, but I don't think there's been enough discussion about it.
The problem
Let's say you . . .
The I/O intensifies
A sought after feature in our cloud has been something to support Hadoop/Spark functionality. So far our I/O performance hasn't been anything to write home (or to the internet) about, but let's hope that will change soon.
What we basically want to do is provide high IOPS capable temporary data processing VMs. On the hardware . . .
Spread 'em!
Especially if you're packin'!
Generic disclaimer: OpenStack Juno (but up to Mitaka I haven't seen a way to do this).
Specific disclaimer: The code for this was written by my colleague Risto Laurikainen, and the credit goes to him.
Let's just jump right into it. We have a small scheduling problem in OpenStack Nova. To understand it, let's explain . . .
Of Cattle and Pets
And Bessie the friendly cow, and that ratty cat you never really liked.
I have been thinking a lot about cattle and pets lately (in the IT sense). If you are not aware of the concept, it's something that Randy Bias (from EMC/Cloudscaling) coined and the admins at CERN made popular. It basically says, you can treat your servers like pets or like cattle.
It's a great simple way to think . . .
Linked Out
Recently we have been fighting with a nasty problem. It started around new years, and had gradually been getting worse.
We use Mellanox 6036 switches for our cloud. They're Infiniband switches, but we run most of the ports in ethernet mode, since you can do that if you have the license. That part is actually pretty cool.
. . .A HPC admin in a Cloud world
Disclaimer: Personal experience may alter your perception of reality. This also applies to yours truly.
This post is also somewhat generalized, there are tons of approaches for HPC and IaaS.
I have a background in administering High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. As I have a lot of colleagues working with HPC, and IaaS . . .
