HP Publishes OpenStack on Ubuntu Reference Architecture

by John Zannos on 1 July 2014

Just in time for the recent HP Discover event, engineers from HP and Canonical published a technical white paper titled: HP Reference Architecture for OpenStack on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This white paper provides the information HP clients need to start planning cloud deployments using OpenStack on Ubuntu with HP servers. For clients who are beginning to experiment with private cloud deployments, this white paper describes the components and steps to get started.

OpenStack is a highly flexible platform that provides many choices for implementation. For this white paper, HP and Canonical provide recommendations for building a small cloud that can be scaled to medium size, by adding compute and storage (block or object) nodes. The base for the reference architecture is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the OpenStack Icehouse release. HP ProLiant SL series hardware, with its powerful, dense compute and storage capabilities, is used, and recommendations are made for network requirements, database, and other components which can vary in an OpenStack deployment. While SL series hardware was chosen for this reference architecture, other Ubuntu certified ProLiant and Moonshot servers may also be suitable, depending on workload requirements.

To simplify installation, the authors recommended using MAAS (Metal as a Service) and Juju. MAAS is the bare-metal provisioning tool that turns your hardware environment into a cloud in minutes. It takes the pain out of detection and configuration and gets your servers ready for deployment. Juju is a service orchestration tool that’s the fastest way to deploy OpenStack on Ubuntu. Its libraries of ‘charms’ make it simple to deploy, configure and scale out cloud services with only a few simple commands. The reference architecture includes steps to get MAAS and Juju started, followed by the steps, using Juju, to deploy each component of OpenStack to get your cloud up and running.

Ubuntu is the world’s most popular choice for OpenStack clouds with over 50% of OpenStack clouds in production (as per a recent OpenStack Foundation survey). HP and Canonical work closely to test and certify Ubuntu on HP ProLiant and Moonshot platforms. HP is also a member of Canonical’s OIL (OpenStack Interoperability Lab) where HP servers are tested on a daily basis along with an entire ecosystem of cloud related infrastructure and Ubuntu.

Be sure to check out the white paper and get started with building a cloud today! For more information regarding Ubuntu OpenStack, Juju and MAAS, go to www.ubuntu.com/cloud. If you would like to investigate further, or request a demo, please get in touch with Canonical.