OpenStack on SmartOS allows running OpenStack on the SmartOS hypervisor platform. SmartOS provides an efficient and secure hypervisor through its use of zones, KVM, ZFS, and DTrace. The presentation outlines work to integrate OpenStack Nova compute and network services with SmartOS, with plans to integrate Quantum network virtualization and leverage ZFS and DTrace for monitoring. The goal is to provide an optimized OpenStack deployment on SmartOS' efficient and flexible virtualization architecture.

1. OpenStack on SmartOS
Daniele Stroppa, ZHAW
24.04.2014, Bern
3rd Swiss OpenStack User Group
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2. Agenda
§ Motivation
§ Why SmartOS?
§ OpenStack on SmartOS
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3. Motivation
§ Cloud providers must be able to offer a single server to multiple users
without them noticing that that they are not the only users of that machine.
This means that the underlying operating system must:
o be able to provision and de-provision, VMs in a very fast seamless
way;
o allocate physical resources efficiently and fairly amongst the users;
o support multithreaded and multi-processor hardware;
o be highly reliable;
o must provide a way to quickly determine what’s causing the system to
misbehave.
§ A customer of the cloud provider will also expect the server to be:
o fast, i.e. the observed latency should be minimal;
o flexible, i.e. get extra power when needed;
o secure, meaning that neighboring users must not interfere with each
other.
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4. Why SmartOS?
§ SmartOS is an open source type 1 hypervisor platform
o Based on Illumos, a descendant of OpenSolaris, and developed by
Joyent
§ SmartOS is a live operating system,
o It can be booted via PXE, USB or an ISO image
o Runs entirely from memory, leaving the full space on the local disk to
be used for virtual machines.
o This type of architecture makes it very secure, easy to upgrade and
recover
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5. Why SmartOS? Zones & KVM!
§ Container-based virtualization
o A container is the combination of resource controls and Solaris zones.
o Provides a lightweight solution and a complete and secure user space
environment on a single global kernel.
o Can easily scale vertically, something that is more difficult with KVM
virtualization.
§ KVM virtual machines
o KVM virtual machines provide a solution for running a variety of guest
OS's, including Linux and Windows, in a full, hardware-assisted
virtualization.
o KVM images on SmartOS run as a process inside of a zone.
§ http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2013/01/11/virtualization-performance-
zones-kvm-xen/
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6. Why SmartOS? ZFS!
§ ZFS combines file system and logical volume manager.
o Fast file system creation - allowing to add new tenants almost instantly
- and data integrity guarantee.
o ZFS also includes storage pools - that simplify the task of expanding
storage capacity - copy-on-write snapshot creation and snapshot
cloning - allowing fast and reliable backup and cloning of virtual
machines.
§ Disk I/O throttling introduced to overcome a drawback in Solaris.
o All zones/applications are ensured to get a reliable turn at reading/
writing to disk.
o When a system is under heavy load from multiple tenants disk I/O
throttling comes into effect, while during quiet time, tenants can enjoy
faster I/O without affecting other users.
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7. Why SmartOS? DTrace!
§ DTrace is a performance analysis tool included by default in different
operating system, amongst them Illumos and Solaris and therefore
SmartOS.
o DTrace can instrument code by modifying a program after it has been
loaded into memory.
o Not limited to use with user-space application, but can be used to
inspect the OS kernel and device drivers.
o In SmartOS, DTrace can be used to analyze and troubleshoot issues
across all zones in a server or within an entire datacenter.
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8. Why SmartOS? Crossbow!
§ SmartOS makes use of Crossbow to provide a network virtualization layer.
o Fully integrated with the virtual machine administration tool of
SmartOS, i.e. vmadm.
o Allows each virtual machine can get up to 32 virtual network interfaces
(VNICs).
§ SmartOS inherits multipath IP (IPMP) from Solaris.
§ SmartOS can leverage data link multi-pathing (DLMP), i.e. trunk
aggregation.
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9. OpenStack on SmartOS - Where are
we?
§ Idea initiated by Thijs (Intel) and Andy (ZHAW)
§ Working with latest OpenStack Grizzly release:
o nova-compute
o nova-network
§ Code publicly available on Github
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10. OpenStack on SmartOS - What's
next?
§ Integrate with OpenStack Quantum
o Possibly integrate with OpenFlow controllers
§ Make DTrace metrics accessible from OpenStack Ceilometer
o Monitoring and billing
§ Integrate ZFS features
o VM cloning (snapshot)
o Block-type storage
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11. Q&A?
Thank you!
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12. References
§ https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/smartos-support
§ https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Smartos
§ http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2013/04/openstack-on-smartos/
§ https://github.com/dstroppa/openstack-smartos-nova-grizzly
§ https://github.com/dstroppa/openstack-smartos-bootstrap
§ strp@zhaw.ch, @moviolone
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