Infrastructure with Virtualization

Virtualization enables on-demand-provisioning of servers running several choices of operating systems and customized software stacks. This leaves the consumer to handle OS, middleware and application deployment on self-service virtual machines that can be started and destroyed on demand.

On-Demand Infrastructure Abstraction

• Abstraction of the hardware layers
• Consumer just requests resources now (self service)
• On-demand growth and reduction (depending on the virtualization tooling)

"Basically, you get as much resources as you need, whenever you want them, available in an instant."

Deployment Scenarios

• You can have it in-house
• You can have it in combination with an external data center
• You can have it provided to you by service providers (Amazon EC2, Windows Azure)

Reasons for utilizing virtual infrastructure

• Reduce the time it takes to setup new machines
• Reduce the time needed for administration
• Increase the number of possible deployments
• Increase the speed of delivering new software versions
• Standardize recurring work with automation (e.g. Chef/Puppet/Ansible)
• Uniformity of production configuration
• Independence of hardware

The most reliable way to build servers is to remove the natural variances introduced by individuals. So automate!

How hardware planning used to be without virtualization

• Get exact specifications of hardware needed
• Order and setup hardware
• Configure hardware manually
• Test the whole setup

Hardware planning with virtualization

• All this work is already done by the infrastructure provider
• You only have to think about the virtual resources you need

OpenStack as Virtualization Solution

• OpenStack is a free and open-source infrastructure platform
• OpenStack is primarily deployed as a flexible infrastructure solution
• OpenStack consists of a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center

OpenStack aims

OpenStack aims to deliver solutions for all types of deployments by being

• Simple to implement
• Massively scalable
• Feature-rich

Who's behind OpenStack?

• Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA
• Promotes the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack
• 17,738+ individual members from 141 countries and 850 different organizations
• Secured more than $10 million in funding

Who is using OpenStack?

OpenStack Powers Demanding Production Workloads Worldwide.

All these organizations use OpenStack to achieve

• Control
• Business agility
• Cost saving

Alternatives to OpenStack

One alternative we often encounter when consulting our customers are VMWare's commercial solutions like vSphere, vCenter and vCloud Suite.