Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Unit 7 is for you to understand cloud deployment activities ready?
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Please review the learning objectives for this unit. Pay particular attention to the first word in each
statement.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
IBM Cloud Manager (ICM) is an example of using the chef automation and infrastructure management
for building the cloud servers. When you first install ICM, you get the chef server and its major
components. In the case of ICM, all these components are on the Deployer except for chef client and
chef supermarket.
• Workstation is where cookbooks are developed and uploaded to chef server
• Cookbook is a configuration module to be run during deployment
• Ruby is the official programming language for chef
• Chef server provides the web user interface and commands for running deployment and managing
infrastructure
You need to have basic understanding of these components and their relationship to work as an
administrator for Cloud Manager.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Cloud Manager installs chef server and its components on the Deployment server. You use chef to
build cloud servers like OpenStack controller and to manage cloud compute resources like PowerKVM
host. The visual shows that chef server supports these cloud components:
• Managed server
• Storage device
• Virtual platform
• Public cloud
• Network device
• Container
An overview of chef is at the below URL:
https://docs.chef.io/chef_overview.html
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
The virtualization environment that you have, maps to a particular cloud environment that you can
build. In this class, you have the PowerKVM host that provides the virtualization resources. You need
to check the Cloud Manager for the type of Power Systems that is supported. The release level of
PowerKVM is a key requirement that is specified in the ICM documentation. Each release level might
also have latest fix packs to be applied.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Any form of help for validating server or host requirements is useful. The knife os manage validate
command is a good tool. It gathers system information data and compares with predefined
requirements. The results are for your validation. You get all the requirements information in one place
although you need to double check for errors. The command might mistake an acceptable variation of
a requirement as an error. In this cloud environment, you have two node types to validate: controller
and kvm. The kvm node type represents kvm on all platforms, which include PowerKVM. The node
type any is for basic validation on a node other than the ones listed. For example, it might be helpful to
validate a block storage node.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
As stated in the previous slide, the validate command generates a YAML file that contains network
information for you to start with configuring the node for deployment. Other information in the validating
results include:
• System time of the node in comparing with the Deployer time. You already learn to use NTP to
synchronize system clock on multiple nodes
• IP addresses for each node
• The node’s fully qualified domain name. Note: You also enter this information on the command line
• User login information, which is either password or SSH identity file
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
To start deploying a cloud, Cloud Manager provides pre-configured cloud environments that are called
topologies. The visual shows a table that presents five topologies you can choose:
• Minimal
• Controller +n compute
• High available controller +n compute
• Distributed database
• Multi-region
The order of cloud environment complexity increases from top down. A brief description of each
topology is provided. You need to know your environment and your objectives of having the cloud.
For more information on topology see below:
CMwOS IBM Knowledge Center: Selecting a topology
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SST55W_4.3.0/liaca/liaca_deploy_overview.html?lang=en
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
You start from the simplest, minimal deployment, and move down to the next topology to match your
requirements. The visual shows two options for minimal deployment. Most of the configuration settings
are by default. Option 1 requires only one server as Deployment server and all other components are
packed into the same server. Only certain hypervisors support this topology, for proof of concept
purposes. Option 2 separates the Deployment server in one node. The rest of the components are in a
second node. With most configuration settings by default, this environment can be deployed with one
simple command for evaluation purposes.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
In this class environment, the hypervisor or compute host is PowerKVM, which the minimal deployment
does not support. Therefore, the next to minimal deployment is Controller +n compute nodes. The
visual shows a diagram that illustrates the topology that contains a Deployment server as you already
installed. The second node in the diagram is the Single Controller, which contains all the OpenStack
components. Note the difference with the topology that has distributed database or OpenStack
components that are installed in multiple nodes. The third node in the diagram is the compute node or
PowerKVM host in this class environment.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
For each deployment topology, Cloud Manager provides a sample file that contains mandatory and
optional configuration settings. You copy this file and edit it to change those settings to match your
environment. The file is written in YAML format that you learned about earlier. Each setting is an
attribute pair of name and value. The visual shows the components that the prescribed configuration is
based on. The exercise of this unit shows how to change the values in the sample YAML configuration
file.
For more information on deploying a prescribed configuration with PowerKVM compute nodes - see
below.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SST55W_4.3.0/liaca/liaca_deploy_prescribed_powerkvm.html?lang=en
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
The knife command starts the deployment processes that are based on the prescribed configuration
file. The automation is also based on OpenStack components configuration the topology calls for. This
topology has all OpenStack components on the controller node while the distributed topology has
OpenStack components and databases on multiple nodes. For each node, the chef client is installed
first. Then, the chef client runs the installation processes on the local node. The order of node
installation follows the configuration file, on one node at a time. If a critical error occurs, the entire
deployment fails. The most common errors come from failure in obtaining the required packages from
different yum repositories. The command error messages contain log files information.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
The knife os manage deploy command runs through many installation steps. It displays messages to
show progress as the steps complete. You might need to run the command in the background and
redirect its text messages to a file. You might also check the log files in /var/log/icm-deployer/nodes/.
Note: There is more than one log file. As the displayed error message indicates, the log file contains
more information for debugging.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
The error log file contains detailed messages about the failure. The visual shows the error when one of
the installation processes could not find a required package. The error message points out that “There
are no optional yum repositories available that contain operating system packages that the Openstack
installation depends on.” After you obtain the missing packages, rerun the knife os manage deploy
command. Another log file from chef is on the installed node, not on the deployer node:
/var/chef/cached/chef-stacktrace.out. If the error occurs while executing in ruby or python code, that log
is generated.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Beside the command line interfaces, Cloud Manager provides a web graphical user interface (GUI) for
the cloud administrator. This interface is a rebranding of the OpenStack Dashboard, as you can see
the modified name “IBM Cloud Manager – Dashboard”. The OpenStack logo is at the lower right
corner. The Overview and other user interface components are similar if not exactly from OpenStack
Dashboard. You manage cloud infrastructures with Dashboard by a simple point and click.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
While Cloud Manager Dashboard is inherently from OpenStack, its Self-Service user interface takes
after IBM Bluemix looks and feels. The web link also points to the cloud controller node although at a
different port: 18443.
Bluemix is the front-end interface to IBM platform services, the user interface that cloud users acquire
services on top of the infrastructure services.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Review the Keywords for this Unit.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Quiz time - answer the following four checkpoint questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
You should have answered:
1. letter c
2. False
3. D - all of the above
4. True
Well done.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Lab time is next - check out the steps you will be doing.
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Unit 7: Understanding cloud deployment activities
Unit summary can you do the following:
• Recognize the cloud deployment model and the controller
• Identify the requirements for computing host resource management
• Recognize the roles of chef server and infrastructure administration
• Recognize the tasks in deploying a cloud environment
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