Architecture

Overview

TryStack is designed to be a sandbox and showcase for various reference hardware and configuration setups. We intend to stand up multiple “zones”, each demonstrating a recommended set of hardware and software configurations.

Zone A features server hardware from Dell, network switches from Cisco and a configuration of OpenStack that relies on libvirt/KVM and a flat DHCP networking model.

Zone B features server hardware and network switches from HP and a configuration of OpenStack that uses libvirt/KVM and a VLAN networking model.

Future zones will come online that will add more capacity to TryStack and highlight alternate vendor hardware and different software configurations.

In general, TryStack zones are set up in the following way:

• One management node runs a stack of software that enables administration, monitoring, and operating system installation for other nodes in the zone
• All other nodes in the zone act as service nodes. These service nodes have different components of the OpenStack software and supporting server software -- e.g. MySQL or RabbitMQ

Zone A - The DELL Zone

The first zone established for TryStack features server hardware from Dell. There are 20 nodes contained in five (5) Dell C6105s 2U server enclosures. Each server node (four (4) in each of the 6105s enclosures) contains:

96GB RAM
2 12-core Intel Xeon processors X5650 or AMD Opteron 4176HE
Two (2) 1GB network interface cards
~5 TB usable disk space -- managed in a RAID10 setup

One (1) server -- hostname: freecloud-mgmt -- is used as a management server and runs the following services:

• dnsmasq -- Used by all compute nodes to determine VMs IP addressing
• chef-server -- http://localhost:4040/ -- The configuration management server used to deploy services into the service nodes user/passwd: admin/openstack
• munin -- http://localhost:8081/ A networked resource monitoring tool useful in tracking performance and usage of resources. user/passwd: munin/openstack
• nagios -- http://localhost:8082/ -- A different resource monitoring tool that does not need to have an agent installed on the tracked nodes (unlike Munin) user/passwd: munin/openstack
• jenkins -- http://localhost:8080/ -- A continuous integration and deployment platform, used for running automated tasks

In addition to the above services, the management server also is responsible for:

• git repositories for:
• The TryStack Chef cookbooks and recipes are at /root/openstack-chef/
• The canonical repo is available on GitHub: https://github.com/trystack/openstack-chef/
• Doing base operating system deploys into other service nodes
• Done using PXE installs

The other nineteen (19) servers are used as service nodes and run a variety of OpenStack servers and services that OpenStack depends on. These services may include one or more of the following:

• mysql-server -- A MySQL database server
• rabbitmq-server -- A RabbitMQ message queueing service
• nova-api -- The OpenStack Compute API server
• nova-scheduler -- The OpenStack Compute instance scheduling service
• nova-compute -- The OpenStack Compute VM management service -- listens for messages sent from the nova-scheduler service and is responsible for performing actions such as launching, terminating or rebooting virtual machines
• nova-network -- The OpenStack Compute networking service -- responds to messages sent from the nova-scheduler and nova-compute services to handle setting up of networking information for virtual machines
• keystone -- The OpenStack Identity API server
• glance-api -- The OpenStack Images API server
• glance-registry -- The OpenStack Images Registry server
• dashboard -- The OpenStack Dashboard server -- web-based console for users and administrators of TryStack