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Revision as of 22:21, 3 October 2016 by Lin Yang (talk | contribs) (Meetings)

Rack Scale Design: Composable Hardware

Rack Scale Design allows considering compute, storage, and networking as disaggregated resources that can be composed on the fly to meet various needs in a data center/cloud. Disaggregation, in addition to allowing hardware refresh at different rates for each of storage, compute, and networking, supports more efficient resource utilization. Imagine a cloud that grew and shrank to meet usage by virtue of being connected to a rack that allowed such dynamic composition and release, where you might compose a node with copious storage or another that provides pure compute horsepower. Intel[5], Dell, Lenovo, HPE [7] among others are interested in composable infrastructure.

To bring such a vision to light, the compute industry collaborated to standardize and define the RESTful Redfish API[1]. Intel PodManager implements the Redfish API. The API, in addition to supporting composition and release of nodes, supports managing them (power-on/off), discovering hardware capabilities, and even collecting advanced telemetry.

Using software that implements the Redfish API, one could construct nodes to deploy an OpenStack Cloud and with drivers for Nova and Ironic grow and shrink the cloud to meet utilization needs. Hardware flavors for the undercloud could be defined no different from VM flavors. This will take us closer to true Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI).

Rack Scale Design

DMTF Redfish

The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc (DMTF) [2] creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. DMTF Redfish™ is an open industry standard specification and schema that specifies a RESTful interface and utilizes JSON and OData to help customers integrate and manage today's scale out hardware solutions, which are very different from the enterprise hardware of the past. Its sponsors are Broadcom, Dell, Emerson, HPE, INspur, Lenovo, MIcrosoft, SuperMicro, VMWare, and Intel among others. For more details refer to [3] and [4].

Rack Scale Controller (RSC)

A brief digression to talk names! Project name not currently finalized/blessed. Rack Scale Controller, RSC for short, is our most generic name. We have explored and abandoned Plasma. Let us know what you think of Valence, and feel free to suggest alternatives.

What is RSC? It really is a collection of all things Rack Scale Control, from an user interface to help compose and view nodes, to supporting launch of an OpenStack cloud using your favorite deployment tool, a place to register blueprints, a banner under which to assemble a growing community interested in this functionality, a place to hold Nova and Ironic drivers and Horizon plugins to support growing/shrinking clouds dynamically, viewing Rack Scale flavors, and more.

We envisage setting up the under cloud and dynamically growing/shrinking the cloud as complementary to OpenStack today. Given that, RSC seeks to become an OpenStack Big Tent project. Registration efforts are underway, ably being managed by Lin (lin dot a dot yang at intel dot com) [6]

The figure below describes how RSC will interact with implementations of RedFish and OpenStack to set up clouds. rack scale controller interactions

Use Cases

A datacenter has multiple racks of machines with a RedFish implementation to control the same.

  1. An enterprise user would like to float a cloud sourcing hardware from the above datacenter.
  2. An enterprise cloud has a transient need for more resources and seeks the same from the above datacenter, wanting to add nodes for storage or compute (virtual machines, bare metal, or containers). (This is where Ironic and Nova plugins and drivers are necessary.)
  3. An enterprise cloud's needs have decreased, and in true utility mode, pay as you go, would like to release its excess resources back to the datacenter. (Once again Nova/Ironic etc plugins necessary, and code to ascertain that no workloads are resident on the machines, and scrubbing software and workflow, before releasing them back to the cloud. )
  4. An enterprise owns the datacenter, but would like to via software power on/off resources to conserve power and cooling needs depending on resource utilization. This is where the RedFish APIs come in handy.
  5. A large datacenter may partition its resources among multiple clouds, each possibly even set up using different deployment tools. (Brings up issues of quota, and of course authentication to the RSC UI).

RSC Web Pages

Here are some pages capturing functionality at 30,000 feet! Rack Scale Controller Web UI pages

OpenStack Horizon Integration

Using a deployment tool of your choice (our team has explored with TripleO and Fuel) can be used to install OpenStack on RSC composed node(s). This could be at the very beginning to create a cloud, or anytime after a cloud has been floated to expand it. Such nodes would become visible through the OpenStack Horizon UI and via OpenStack CI through calls such as Nova list. Shown below is Horizon UI listing all hypervisors, aka compute nodes, assuming on Node-1, using a deployment tool, we have launched Nova-compute.

Horizon Integration, showing RSC composed node with Nova-compute deployed.

Source Code

Look Who is Interested!

  1. shuquan
  2. octopuszhang
  3. kevinshu96
  4. malinib (attending OpenStack Barcelona)
  5. mritikka (attending OpenStack Barcelona)
  6. Ananth Narayan (attending OpenStack Barcelona)
  7. Lin Yang
  8. Nate Potter
  9. Deepti Ramakrishna
  10. Ruijing
  11. Chester
  12. jfding
  13. shuquan (attending OpenStack Barcelona)
  14. snivas
  15. yufei
  16. chakri
  17. Mandy_
  18. Andy_Yan
  19. Maohaijun
  20. yangxing4
  21. wangzhandong

Meetings

Meetings will alternate on mornings and evenings on even and odd weeks, Wednesdays 8 am and 8 pm PDT.

  • Channel: freenode #openstack-valence
  • Even weeks: 8 AM PDT
  • Odd weeks: 3:00 AM UTC (8:30 AM India/11 AM Beijing)

Provide your input to the meeting agenda at RSC-Agenda

Logs of meetings past RSC-Meetings

Happenings!

Licensing

Apache License v2

FAQs

  1. Do I need a Rack to develop and test Rack Scale Controller features? No, you could get by using a simulator. Please contact us. But to deploy your cloud you will need real hardware.
  2. Where can I learn more? Come join our meeting. Check out the references below. Join us on IRC.

References

[1] https://www.dmtf.org/standards/redfish

[2] https://www.dmtf.org/

[3] https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/SPMF%20Introduction%20to%20Redfish%20May%202016.pdf

[4] https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0266_1.0.4.pdf

[5] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-rack-scale-architecture.html

[6] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/341966/

[7] https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-touts-composable-infrastructure-with-synergy/2015/12/