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Getting the most performance out of Openstack, and NFV

October 14, 2017 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

By now, most IT staff has either had a chance to deploy OpenStack, or at least are familiar with what it is and what benefits it offers. We’ve moved past the installer race, the fragmentation of “as-a-service” components, and endless TCO calculators. The ecosystem and community has reached a maturity stage where the media and industry alike are calling OpenStack “boring“. Don’t be fooled, all of these are good things. They’re a product of fast-paced innovation seeing a settling of opinions and decision making. OpenStack has reached a maturity point that Linux also hit earlier on in its journey. As linux was (and still is) an incredibly capable and cost-effective option for an OS, OpenStack is also an incredibly capable and cost-effective option for private or public cloud. But now what? What’s next? The answer is deeper and more efficient capability, addressing more edge use-cases, and general polish and integration of all the development that’s happened to date. The low-hanging-fruit development is over, we’re deeper into the less exciting and less headline grabbing work; maximizing the assets as much as we can.

There’s been a lot of blog traffic regarding tips and tricks, technologies to consider for different use-cases, etc. Given the recent explosion in NFV development and adoption, I’ll highlight the ones that I think provide the most benefit in the area to try and cut down on the amount of reading needing to be done. Here we go:

  1. Getting the most out of your instances. This is a great summary on the options available to maximize function and performance of OpenStack instances.
  2. Helpful deployment and operations management tips. These are great suggestions on working smartly with new deployments, and maintaining them throughout the lifecycle.
  3. Operations must-have: dynamic ansible inventory for TripleO. If you’re doing ad-hoc maintenance on your cloud outside of tripleo, you’d be silly to not use ansible and its dynamic inventory.

NFV specific material:

  1. What OSP technologies should I look at to help scale and tune for network intensive workloads?
    • Scaling virtual machine network performance for network intensive workloads
    • Boosting the NFV datapath
  2. Now that we know what technologies are available, if I have “x” workload, which options should I tune?
    • Reference Architecture: Mobile Networks and NFV performance and optimization
  3. OVS-DPDK with multi-queue, and further NFV performance tuning:
    • How to enable nova multi queue support with and without OVS-DPDK in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10
    • OSP Newton NFV Configuration Guide
  4. Tuning for zero packet loss in Red Hat OpenStack Platform, 3 part series:
    • Tuning for Zero Packet Loss in Red Hat OpenStack Platform – Part 1
    • Tuning for Zero Packet Loss in Red Hat OpenStack Platform – Part 2
    • Tuning for Zero Packet Loss in Red Hat OpenStack Platform – Part 3

If you have any questions, or come across anything else that you think should be added – let me know! Happy management and tuning.

Filed Under: cloud, devops, open source, OpenStack, performance tuning Tagged With: devops, open cloud, open source, openstack, performance tuning, private cloud

Home lab, CAT6 wiring, and rack

September 13, 2017 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

Between being busy with home renovations, and writing articles for work, I haven’t made much time for blogging this summer. Since it’s raining today and hampering my home renos, I’m finally getting to a post on the work I did wiring my house with CAT 6, and setting up a home lab rack in the basement. I realise having a rack in your house is a little ridiculous, but for those folks who like to tinker or need more resources than a desktop PC or laptop, it is incredibly useful (and affordable) to have. Like others, my home lab serves up some basic components for my home network, and also allows a testing ground that gets quite a bit of usage.

CAT6 Home Wiring:

This is a much easier project than most think. It goes a long way to offer connectivity to the various devices in your home, as well as increases your home’s market value. While I have home WiFi, its nice to be able to offer high speed bandwidth and reliability to every room in your house, and use the WiFi solely for areas that are difficult to run cable to. Moreover, its a much better WiFi experience to extend access points via wired switching than bridging antenneas. To put it candidly, I’ve never had to buffer any Netflix show off my PS3 or otherwise since running cable 🙂 .

Materials list:

I bought this all off monoprice.com via Amazon, for a total cost of about $400 CDN. I already had the tools and some experience running cable from previous employment. Having the added benefit of living in a bungalow with an undeveloped basement, I only had to traverse one floor with the cabling. But the same steps apply for additional floors and hopefully you have tiled ceiling in the basement if it’s not undeveloped. Otherwise, you’ll need to make holes and patch it up afterwards.

– Cat 6 cable roll
– Cat 6 plugs, boots, RJ45 keystone connectors
– Low-voltage mounting bracket and wall plates
– Patch panel and patch panel hinged wall mount
– Cable tester, Cable stripper, Wire cutters, RJ45 crimper/punch tool
– Drywall saw, stud finder, drywall mud and trowel, drywall sandpaper, vacuum

First, I cut holes in the upstairs drywall adjacent to the coaxial cable outlets, as I know there is existing holes drilled behind these that lead to the basement. I piggy backed on these same holes, and made a couple new ones where I needed room. Hint, if you cut the drywall on a 45 degree angle facing inward to the wall (as opposed to 90 degrees) it makes it easier to set the drywall and mud back over it when you’re done. This allows the piece you cut out to sit back in the hole without falling in or forward.

cat 6 wiring cat 6 wiring IMG_20170225_152304 IMG_20170308_122712 IMG_20170225_152329 IMG_20170225_152437 IMG_20170225_152448

The cable runs follow the other low-voltage cable (coaxial/RJ11) and terminate near the electrical panel where I’ve added another wood backing. This gave me extra space to mount the patch panels, relocate other cabling, and have an electrician mount additional circuits that are used for the rack.

IMG_20170225_170725 IMG_20170308_122701 IMG_20170308_111422

After running the cable, I used the punchdown tool to place the cable in the back of the patch port as well as at the other end in the keystone connector jack. There’s color coding in both to make it easy, but generally you should use Type B termination everywhere. With cables punched down, I tested the circuits with the cable tester to confirm termination, and confirmed I could grab an IP address from a router and did a bandwidth test.

IMG_20170226_134808 IMG_20170226_134812 IMG_20170913_103059 IMG_20170913_103243

Next came assembling the used rack found off the local classifieds, racking the gear, and making cable from the patch panel to the rack. Generally tried to keep things as tidy as possible for cabling.

 IMG_20170913_103219 IMG_20170913_103132 IMG_20170913_103234

Overall, I spent a couple of weekends completing the project, and currently have 8/24 cable runs populated. This covers my office, living room, and bedroom. Next up is patching in the kitchen, and the ceiling for an AP mount. In the rack I have:

– 2 Dell PowerConnect switches (1x 48 port, 1x 24 port, just the 48 port shown.)
– HP Z800, 2x Intel Xeon X5570, 16 core , 96 GB RAM, 3x 256 GB SSD in RAID0, 2x 2TB HDD in RAID1.
– Triplite 1.5 KW UPS, and APC 1.0 KW UPS.
– Tower PC, 1x Intel i7-2600K, 8 core , 32 GB RAM, 1x 256 GB SSD, 4x 1TB HDD in RAID5.
– HP DL360 G7, 2x Intel Xeon E5640, 24 core, 144 GB RAM, 3x 500 GB SSD in RAID0.

The cable modem and Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN router sit upstairs in my office as they’re silent, and are trunked into the ToR switch. My workstation in the office upstairs is a Tower PC, 1x Intel i7-5930K, 12 core, 64 GB RAM, 1x 256 GB SSD M.2 NVMe, 5x 500 GB SSD in RAID5 with a boat load of screen real estate. 🙂 . The rack gear is all KVM hypervisors hosting a handful of VMs for DNS cache, grafana, monitoring, and a whack of OpenStack reproducing environments from Juno to Ocata.

IMG_20170913_114902

Filed Under: networking, open source, OpenStack Tagged With: homelab, networking, open source, openstack, private cloud

Calgary OpenStack and other Meetup.com groups

March 21, 2017 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

I’m a little late on this post, but last week we had an excellent presentation on OpenStack installers. Specifically, TripleO. Chris J from Red Hat gave us a good outline of TripleO’s capabilities, and kept it pretty upstream. For the presentation slide deck, see here. The group tries to keep it as vendor neutral as possible which is nice. There were a lot of questions and feedback, this is probably a topic worth going into in a little more detail, or perhaps doing some hackfest demo’ing!

Triple O by Chris J.

There’s been quite an uptick in our local OpenStack meetup group lately, it’s been fun to see and get involved with. Both this group, as well as our Red Hat User Group has brought in some high profile and very talented open source folks who’ve presented and shared their knowledge with us.

The OpenStack meetup groups across Canada have come together and created a Slack channel for easier communication and sharing among its members. If you’re interested in joining the channel, drop a comment or send me an email for an invite!

Filed Under: cloud, devops, enterprise, open source, OpenStack Tagged With: devops, hybrid cloud, open cloud, open source, openstack, private cloud, public cloud

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