OSU Open Source Lab

OpenStack on OpenPOWER

Openstack has been growing in popularity over the past few years and recently we’ve started to look into it further here at the OSL. We plan to continue to use Ganeti for our high-available IaaS needs, however we’re researching ways to integrate Openstack at the lab as well. While Ganeti provides a solid, stable and simple platform for general IaaS needs, Openstack provides better support for elastic and dynamic needs. We feel that using both platforms gives the best of both worlds, because they each fill a specific niche in a cloud environment.

Earlier this year we teamed up with IBM to work on deploying Openstack on the OpenPOWER architecture with the goal of expanding our Supercell infrastructure beyond the x86 architecture. Thanks to the hard work by both the IBM and OSUOSL team, we’ve been able to deploy Openstack on four IBM OpenPOWER machines which support KVM and little endian.

OpenStack on OpenPOWER screenshot running a Fedora Guest.

Currently we have the nodes deployed on Fedora 20 with Fedora 20 guests working properly. We’re also working on getting Debian and Ubuntu guests to work properly. Our goal is to provide ppc64 guest images for the Openstack Community on OpenPOWER in addition to providing OpenPOWER Openstack and KVM specific deployment documentation. We are planning to provide this platform to the general FOSS communities by early June 2014.

To keep up to date on the status of the cluster, please feel free to subscribe to the OSUOSL OpenPOWER announcement mailing list.