SaltStack and HPE OneView for Event-Driven Orchestration of the Modern Data Center Leveraging SaltStack to programmatically control HPE BladeSystem c7000 through HPE OneView

Technical white paper

Technical white paper

Contents Executive summary ........................................................................................................................................... 3 Solution overview .............................................................................................................................................. 3

Key technologies ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Solution diagram ............................................................................................................................................ 3

Design considerations and solution components .............................................................................................. 4 Summary ........................................................................................................................................................... 5 Resources and additional links .......................................................................................................................... 7

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Executive summary SaltStack is a proven and trusted remote execution and configuration management framework suitable for handling configuration of thousands of nodes as well as monitoring and controlling complex infrastructures. BladeSystem c7000 infrastructure offer a unique approach to assuring application performance on the modular BladeSystem architecture. The integration discussed in this white paper connects SaltStack and HPE OneView in a way that enables complete end-to-end control of resources from bare metal to OS provisioning, to establishing production-ready application instances, to ongoing event-driven maintenance through intelligent response against changing environments.

Solution overview The enterprise data center today is complex and can be difficult to control and secure at massive scale and with typically heterogeneous infrastructure and application environments. HPE OneView provides a powerful control plane for HPE BladeSystem c7000 infrastructure offerings but is not designed to manage cloud and data center infrastructure from other providers. SaltStack supplements the granular power of BladeSystem c7000 and HPE OneView by providing a single orchestration and automation solution for the heterogeneous, scale-out data center that now integrates directly with HPE OneView.

The HPE OneView and SaltStack integration allows IT organizations to efficiently manage every aspect of a data center infrastructure through modern, software-defined automation. Highlights of the integration include:

• SaltStack targets HPE BladeSystem c7000 for jobs and management tasks based on HPE OneView inventory data which is leveraged as the single source of data center truth.

• The SaltStack Proxy Minion functionality allows provisioning, configuration and other automation routines to be extended to HPE OneView-managed server, chassis, network and storage infrastructure.

• SaltStack leverages HPE OneView Insight Control Server Provisioning to deploy an operating system from bare metal.

• SaltStack configuration automation deploys and configures any application stack to run on HPE BladeSystem c7000 using HPE OneView.

• SaltStack data-driven orchestration listens to the HPE OneView message bus and a network of event-generating Salt Beacons to proactively react to alerts and changes for optimized system state configuration, security and compliance.

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Figure 1. SaltStack provides event-driven orchestration and configuration management for the heterogeneous, enterprise data center

Key technologies SaltStack is an agent-based or agentless platform for configuration management and remote execution of large fleets of heterogeneous physical, virtual compute and cloud resources. In a SaltStack installation, one or more Salt Master nodes control large numbers of Salt Minions. SaltStack also offers Proxy Minions - agent processes that connect to systems and services that would not normally be able to run the Salt Minion agent.

This integration takes the form of a Proxy Minion that connects to HPE OneView (version 2 or 3) through HPE’s Unified API and makes a HPE BladeSystem c7000 a SaltStack-managed environment. This integration extends to mirroring the HPE OneView State Change Message BUS into the SaltStack event BUS thus enabling event-driven infrastructure. SaltStack Reactors can be written to watch for specific SCMB events and execute SaltStack states and execution modules based on the event content.

In its current form this integration solution:

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• Exposes HPE OneView data about HPE BladeSystem c7000 system resources as SaltStack Grains. SaltStack can utilize grains for a number of things, but the most powerful feature is SaltStack grain-based targeting of systems or system components for remote execution of tasks or to apply configuration templates, for example.

• Retrieves extensive information about resources known to HPE OneView and executes plans based on this information;

• Applies and deletes existing server profiles from templates;

• Executes pre-created HPE Insight Control server provisioning (ICsp) build plans;

• Retrieves information about ISsp build plans.

The key technologies that comprise this integrated solution include:

• SaltStack Enterprise

• HPE OneView

• Hardware: HPE ProLiant, HPE BladeSystem c7000 enclosures and HPE Blade server.

Figure 2. The full power of SaltStack combined with the power of HPE OneView via the HPE OneView Unified API

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Solution diagram The figure 3 illustrates the integration of the key technologies and their core components. Please also refer to the design configuration and solutions components section for a step-wise description of the overall process.

Figure 3. SaltStack Master & Minion architecture

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Figure 4. Interaction diagram of SaltStack with HPE OneView

Design considerations and solution components An example usage scenario of the integration of SUSE OpenStack Cloud, HPE OneView and the physical hardware is described in the steps below, along with the solution diagram figure 4 which illustrates these interactions:

• Hardware

• Setup, rack and cable each system and its devices according to the product's documentation

• HPE OneView

• Setup the product according to the documentation and ensure all of the desired system resources are discovered and available for configuration

• Setup server profile templates to match each of the intended roles for resources, including control, compute and storage. At a minimum, ensure that:

• firmware is up-to-date and set to known working versions for the respective platforms

• direct, local-attached storage devices are configured to be compatible with the roles being targeted and take into account any multiple device configurations needed for high availability or for resiliency perspectives

• To match the desired network topology of the overall cloud, the expected number and type of network interfaces are enabled for each node role, with the boot priority set to PXE for the respective network card.

• SaltStack

• Setup the product according to the documentation and ensure the SaltStack Master is up and running. It is recommended that a SaltStack Minion also be installed on the SaltStack Master.

• Select a node to run the Salt Proxy Minion. Install the SaltStack integration package for HPE OneView on that node. The node can be the same machine as the SaltStack Master, as long as it has network connectivity to the management network where HPE OneView and ICsp reside.

• Configure the Pillar with credentials.

Example:

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proxy: host: oneview.corp.domain.com proxytype: hpeov username: Administrator password: secret icsp_host: icsp.corp.domain.com icsp_username: Administrator icsp_password: secret

• Ensure the proxy configuration file has a line indicating to which master it should connect. Example:

master: salt-master.corp.domain.com

• Start the salt-proxy and accept its key on the master.

On the node running the proxy:

salt-proxy –proxyid=<desired ID for proxy>

On the salt-master:

salt-key –Ay

It will take a few minutes for the proxy to retrieve all the grains data from HPE OneView. The proxy is ready when

salt <proxy id> test.ping

Returns True.

You can then view grains with

salt <proxy id> grains.items

See the documentation for other tasks.

• To enable mirroring of the SCMB to the Salt event bus, add this to the proxy’s configuration file:

engines: - hpeov: route: 'scmb.alerts.#'

• You can view the event bus in real time on the salt-master with

salt-run state.event pretty=True

• Reactors can be written to respond to events appearing on the bus. See the Salt documentation for details.

Key Points In summary, the SaltStack integration with HPE OneView allows SaltStack to control HPE BladeSystem c7000 resources exposed by HPE OneView with the same precision and granularity that SaltStack controls other elements of a heterogeneous data center infrastructure. Adding this feature to infrastructure enables:

• SaltStack to control bare metal resources as easily as it provides configuration management and remote execution for provisioned infrastructure and application environments;

• Infrastructure to be documented with the same files that describe to SaltStack how to manage system resources;

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• Infrastructure to be versioned like source code, since SaltStack state files can be kept in version control;

• Adaptive, event-driven infrastructure through an integrated HPE State Change Message Bus, SaltStack event bus, and the SaltStack Reactor.

Summary The power of HPE OneView is now available through SaltStack as a single software-defined automation platform that delivers event-driven orchestration for heterogeneous data center environments including any infrastructure and application stack. While SaltStack is a compelling solution for both configuration management and remote execution across complex infrastructures, the SaltStack and HPE OneView integration delivers truly composable infrastructure for both physical or virtual systems and now bare metal. SaltsStack is currently testing integration of HPE Synergy with SaltStack. Together, SaltStack and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are enabling software-defined, end-to-end management of all data center resources.

Now Salt can be used to query HPE OneView for available resources, provision those bare-metal machines, command ICsp to deploy operating systems, and seed a SaltStack Minion agent on those machines, connecting them to the SaltStack Master, for ongoing, automated maintenance. This event-driven integration is unique in the systems management software industry and for the first time provides a level of programmatic, artificial intelligence for comprehensive enterprise data center security and control.

Visit http://www.saltstack.com/hpe for more information about the SaltStack and HPE OneView integration. This page includes a video recording of a demo and details on how to acquire the integration code.

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Resources and additional links HPE Solutions hpe.com/info/composableprogram

hpe.com/solutions

SaltStack http://saltstack.com/hpe

Salt Documentation http://docs.saltstack.com

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