Published by Joss Winn on October 31, 2012 at 4:24 pm
We spent a few days last week trying to install OpenStack on RHEL6, but hit a brick wall in the documentation. We’re now waiting for iLO access to our servers so that we can install Ubuntu on them (the reference platform for installing OpenStack), and we expect to deploy it via Puppet. We’ve been using Puppet for other projects and got further in 30 mins with Puppet installing OpenStack than we did over several days wrestling with RHEL.
In the meantime, here’s a nice video.
Published by Nick Jackson on October 4, 2012 at 10:12 am
Following on from a summer of mind-boggling delays and discussions (for a number of reasons), today our first server was hooked up to iLO in readiness for installation of the OS. As soon ask this is in place we can start rocking out our OpenCloud installation.
Watch this space. It’ll be awesome. We promise.
Published by Joss Winn on September 4, 2012 at 8:55 am
For those of you interested in this kind of thing, we’re using the following hardware to build our initial Cloud.
It may be of interest to readers of this blog that the budget we had for this hardware was around £17,000.
At the point of writing, the following diagram shows how we think everything will click together. This will almost certainly change, but we’ll keep you updated when it does.
Published by Nick Jackson on August 22, 2012 at 11:38 am
Just a little update to let you know that we’re not all dead, but are in fact still waiting on the provisioning of our servers. This is almost entirely out of our control, and despite the best efforts of ourselves and our ever-helpful colleagues in ICT we’ve been held back in physically coupling our servers to the networks they need (despite the servers themselves being physically in the rack).
The delay is down to the fact that the University is currently engaged in construction work in the building which houses the datacentre containing our servers. This meant that our systems and networking team had to wait until somebody was available to give them the site induction necessary to walk the few yards from the lift to the datacentre door. Yep, even digital projects can be thwarted by Health and Safety. Even after receiving the necessary training, people were then unable to enter the building yesterday due to a construction worker accidentally damaging an air conditioning refrigerant conduit. I have assurances that our servers will be coupled to their iLO and management networks by lunchtime today (although I’m not putting bets on it), so that we can get going installing the OS.
Published by Joss Winn on August 20, 2012 at 2:34 pm
If you Google
and
and
these are currently the most interesting results I could see:
MIT’s Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory seem to be active in running their own cloud. 768 cores and 3TB of RAM. Not bad!
Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science also have their own cloud. They seem to have two installations running at the moment, one being deployed via Puppet.
The University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (part of the School of Engineering) have a research group that are “interested in extending OpenStack as a platform for academic research in cloud computing.”
The University of Alabama’s College of Engineering are running OpenStack on their HPC cluster.
The Engineering Task Force, part of the UK’s e-science programme, undertook an evaluation of OpenStack last year. It’s a year old now and things have moved on, but it’s still worth a read. They conclude that OpenStack “is a mature, well-backed software for implementing an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud. The set of features and multicomponent architecture allows many different deployment scenarios to be developed addressing differing needs for scale, availability and reliability.”
St Andrews have a research group that uses OpenStack. They aim “to become an international centre of excellence for research and teaching in cloud computing and will provide advice and information to businesses interested in using cloud-based services.” It’s good to see OpenStack being integrated into teaching and they’ve also run some related HackDays, too.
The University of Surrey’s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences have an OpenStack cloud that’s also used in undergraduate and post-graduate teaching, as well as supporting research projects. Surrey’s setup and objectives seem to be similar to what we currently have in mind for Lincoln.
Australia’s nationally funded NeCTAR service offer cloud computing facilities that are accessible to researchers across the country.
Eduserv are also considering whether to offer OpenStack as part of their cloud computing service. One nice thing about this, compared to other commercial offerings, is that it would run on the JANET backbone.
It’s early days but it’s good to see that it’s being adopted in academia – noticeably so in the discipline of Engineering. If you know of other uses of OpenStack in higher education, please leave a comment. Also, we’ve created a public mailing list, specifically for the discussion of using OpenStack for teaching, learning and research. Feel free to join and let us know what you’re doing with it. We’re just getting started!
Edit 07/09/12: Nice to see that CERN are using OpenStack, too 