Deploying OpenStackUsing the Xen Project Hypervisor on SUSE OpenStack Cloud

Why Choose the Xen Project Hypervisor for Your SUSE OpenStack Cloud?

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Reason 1: Where Xen Project is Today

• Xen Project powers many of the largest clouds in the world:‒ Amazon AWS, Huawei in Asia, Rackspace Public cloud, etc.

• It is backed by many of the largest players in the industry:‒ Amazon, Google, Verizon, Oracle, NetApp, Intel, AMD...

‒ http://xenproject.org/directory/project-members.html

• Established track record‒ Twelve years of service this year

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Reason 1: Where Xen Project is Today

• Scalable

• Reliable

• Securability‒ Extremely powerful security capabilities

‒ See “XPUS14: Introducing the Advanced Security Features of the Xen Project Hypervisor” in the Presentations and Videos section of XenProject.org

• Multimodal‒ PV, HVM, PVHVM, PVH

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Reason 2: Designed for Cloud

• Before the Cloud was the Cloud, someone had an idea:

A new distributed computing paradigm, termed global public computing, which allows any user to run any code anywhere. Such platforms price computing resources, and ultimately charge users for resources consumed.

‒ From a paper about the Xenoservers project at Cambridge University in the late 1990s

‒ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xeno/publications.html

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Reason 3: Innovations for the Future

• Empowering the Next Generation Cloud:‒ Pioneering highly dense, small VMs which are small & secure

‒ Going from dozens of VMs per host today to potentially thousands

‒ See the Rise of the Unikernel video at XenProject.org

‒ Moving into the Embedded space

‒ Xen Automotive subproject

‒ Cell phones

‒ ARM devices

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Reason 3: Innovations for the Future

• XenGT‒ Virtualization of the GPU

‒ Traditional virtualization was headless; no longer true!

‒ See the demo in Presentations & Videos on XenProject.org

• Empowering Datacenters‒ COLO: Non-stop high-availability for VMs (4.6 targeted)

• Real-time schedulers under development

• The Cloud is too important to leave to a hypervisor which is not aggressively empowering the next generation in Cloud!

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Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack

• The Project lets interested parties do as they wish‒ No corporate plan to fulfill

‒ No target demographics; no one to say “we're not interested”

‒ This philosophy served us well

• But, initially, few came forward in OpenStack‒ SUSE made Xen Project work out-of-the-box in their offering,

but few others

‒ Jim Fehlig of SUSE pioneered libvirt support, which is now the preferred interface for Xen Project in OpenStack (Feb 2015)

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Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack

• Xen Project Platform Team awakens to the problem‒ In late 2014, the team begins focus on OpenStack integration

‒ Stefano Stabellini moves the integration forward

‒ Anthony Perard submits patches to OpenStack, accepted in February 2015

‒ Now standard OpenStack supports Xen Project out of the box!

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Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack

• Moving up the OpenStack supported hypervisor matrix‒ Currently Group C (as of Q1 2015)

‒ We anticipate entering Group B in Q2 2015

‒ Target to become Group A before 2015 comes to a close

• Documentation‒ As of Q3 2014, there was nothing on wiki.XenProject.org

‒ Now, multiple pages covering installation, configuration

‒ Blog posts

‒ OpenStack manual needs updating next (still cites XAPI only)

How Can I Make it Happen?

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How Do I Optimize It?

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Xen Project Optimizations

• Set Domain 0 Memory from 1 to 4 GB‒ dom0_mem=1024M

• Set Domain 0 VCPUs to 4‒ dom0_max_vcpus=4 dom0_vcpus_pin

• Use LVM for local storage‒ VOLUME_GROUP=volume_group_name

• PV versus HVM guests‒ nova image-meta set vm_mode=HVM

‒ Nova image-meta delete vm_mode