HP OpenStack Helion First Meet

Despite the growing popularity of cloud technologies, only a small proportion of companies have so far transferred their entire IT infrastructure to a private or public cloud. In addition to security risks, the use of public clouds using a closed architecture means complete dependence on the provider and serious problems when the company tries to transfer its applications and data to another “cloud” provider. At the same time, not all even large enterprises have highly qualified IT specialists who are able to design and quickly deploy a private cloud, as well as servers and storage systems necessary for its work. Recently, many enterprises are considering using the hybrid cloud model, i.e. transfer of critical applications and their data to the private cloud, and other applications to the public. The main problem with this approach is to ensure the compatibility of public and private clouds, which is practically impossible to implement if each cloud is built on the basis of its closed proprietary architecture.



In an effort to get away from using proprietary technologies in building clouds, HP relied on the OpenStack project launched in 2010 as part of Open Source, which, according to its website openstack.org, aims to “create a cloud operating system that manages large pools of computing resources, storage resources and network data center resources. All of these resources are managed using a centralized administration console, and users can independently access these resources via a web interface.

OpenStack can be considered as the equivalent of Linux for clouds, that is, this open source cloud operating system can work on standard computer equipment of any manufacturer. It is built on a modular basis, and its modules interact with each other and the outside world through RESTful API interfaces. Each OpenStack module is developed within a separate project, the main ones of which are:
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- Nova (Computing Resource Controller)
- Glance (a library of virtual machine images used by Nova)
- Keystone (user authorization service and communication between modules)
- Swift (distributed object storage)
- Cinder (block data storage)
- Trove (interface to relational and non-relational databases)
- Neutron (management services for software-defined network infrastructure)
- Heat (template-based orchestration)
- Ceilometer (meter consumed services)
- Horizon (OpenStack Infrastructure Management Web Console).

Due to modularity in OpenStack, it is easy to implement support for new hardware, hypervisors, protocols, and identification mechanisms.

HP has been actively involved in the OpenStack project since its inception (now the company has Platinum Founding Member status), and in May last year presented a full portfolio of products and services for building private, public and hybrid clouds, developing and deploying HP Helion cloud applications.

HP Helion product and solution family - short description

The key product in the HP Helion portfolio is HP Helion OpenStack, which is a vastly expanded OpenStack distribution, to which HP has added a number of modules that enhance the use of this software in the corporate sector to serve business-critical applications. The main purpose of this distribution is to accelerate the deployment of clouds and the development of cloud applications in companies that provide cloud services on the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS model to several organizations and their users using several data centers.



As can be seen from the HP Helion OpenStack scheme, where standard modules are grayed out and modules developed by HP are blue, HP has significantly expanded the basic services of the Operation Services environment (about 1.5 million lines of code have been written by HP programmers). In particular, the HP Helion OpenStack add-on modules implement a simple package installation procedure, enhanced code, improved stability, simplified management, and better source code stability. All patches and code updates for HP Helion OpenStack are thoroughly tested by HP, and the system administrator himself determines which updates will be installed on his computers.

In HP Helion OpenStack, the Cinder data storage service adds integration with HP 3PAR StorServ disk arrays and HP StoreVirtual VSA software-defined storage implemented on the basis of standard architecture servers, which allows these storage systems to be used for provisioning additional capacity to virtual machines. The HP 3PAR StorServ and HP StoreVirtual VSA systems, servicing the cloud, control the Sirius service based on the RESTful API for remote control over the Web.

For the Neutron network service, HP Helion OpenStack supports the VXLAN extended virtual network mechanism, which is used to build public clouds and large corporate networks, providing cloud scaling to 16 million isolated networks. Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR), a distributed virtual routing (DVR) service in HP Helion OpenStack, allows you to configure the connection between Virtual Network Switches (VNS) virtual switches, as well as connecting VNS hosts to external networks.

To simplify the deployment of the OpenStack cloud using TripleO (OpenStack-on-OpenStack), HP has added deployment artifacts in the HP package: virtual machine images, virtual machine boot images and deployment templates.

Other HP Helion OpenStack enhancements not found in the standard OpenStack distribution include scripts for backing up and restoring the cloud management infrastructure, centralized monitoring of the state of the OpenStack infrastructure using the Icinga console and analyzing logs based on Kibana software.

To enhance security in HP Helion OpenStack, the Keystone authentication service is integrated with LDAP and Active Directory directory services. The cloud based on HP Helion OpenStack does not have single points of failure, and for services of the controller of computing resources Nova and storing data in the form of Cinder blocks, the mechanism for failing active cloud failover is implemented.

In addition to the mainstream commercial distribution, HP supplies the HP Helion OpenStack Community distribution for free to get familiar with the OpenStack technologies, develop applications and run small pilot projects. This distribution scales 30 managed physical servers with 600 virtual machines (commercial HP Helion OpenStack supports up to 100 nodes and 4 thousand virtual machines in the current version) and uses only the HP KVM based hypervisor on Debian, while the main edition also allows you to deploy virtual machines VMware vSphere.

For these two distributions, an additional software module is also available for the developers of the HP Helion OpenStack Development Platform, which is a PaaS solution based on the Cloud Foundry open source platform.

The HP Helion OpenStack portfolio also includes ready-made HP Helion CloudSystem software and hardware systems for building a private cloud from scratch, available in two editions: Foundation and Enterprise. Enterprise Edition is designed to build a cloud across the enterprise with the ability to provide comprehensive services and a modern self-service portal focused on end users, and the HP Helion CloudSystem Foundation will help companies start using cloud computing based on OpenStack technology inside the IT service without deep knowledge of this technology. If these solutions are ordered as a single hardware and software complex, the hardware platform is two HP ConvergedSystem converged systems, which we already talked about in this blog - HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC and enterprise-level HP ConvergedSystem CS700 / CS700x .


HP Converged System 200

The latest novelty from the HP Helion family is the HP Helion Rack rack-mount complex based on the HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9 and HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 dual-socket servers for the rapid deployment of a private cloud based on OpenStack, released in March. In addition, HP has released a detailed guide to deploying HP Helion on HP BladeSystem c7000 blade servers.

Currently, HP Helion OpenStack officially supports deployment on HP ProLiant DL racks and HP ProLiant BladeSystem blades, as well as some models of rack servers from other vendors.

We'll talk more about some of the HP Helion products in the next articles in this series.

» SDN: alternative or addition to traditional networks?
» New network architectures: open or closed solutions?
» Implementing MSA in a virtualized enterprise environment
» HP MSA Disk Arrays as a Basis for Data Consolidation
» Multivendor corporate network: myths and reality
» Available HP ProLiant server models (10 and 100 series)
» Convergence based on HP Networking. Part 1
» HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 - server with insane extensibility

Thanks for attention!