Red Hat OpenStack & Citrix NetScaler Simplify Deployment of L4-L7 Services

To give customers the ability to automate application delivery network services from OpenStack, Citrix has worked with Red Hat to integrate NetScaler with their OpenStack distribution. 
Many organizations are building private cloud platforms as a way to increase the agility of IT infrastructure and to increase the efficiency of operations to support their business critical applications. Over the past few years we have seen an increasing move towards deploying OpenStack, which is an open source cloud management platform, in production environments. By integrating with Red Hat OpenStack, Citrix makes NetScaler available to the many organizations that use this popular OpenStack distribution. As organizations use OpenStack to automate the deployment of servers, storage and networking they are also looking to automate the provisioning of L4 – L7 services. To do this they need their networking equipment vendors to provide integration of their devices with OpenStack in a way that addresses deployment challenges involved in offering infrastructure-as-a-service. These challenges include scalability, elasticity, performance and flexibility/control over resource allocation. Citrix built NetScaler Control Center as a way to ease integration of NetScaler with the LBaaS service in OpenStack. The Citrix LBaaS solution enables IT organizations to guarantee performance and availability service level assurances (SLAs) as well as provide redundancy and seamless elasticity while rapidly deploying line of business applications in OpenSack.

Using Application Delivery Services to Build Scalable OpenStack Clouds

As your organization seeks to increase IT agility and reduce operating costs building an orchestration platform like OpenStack to automate the deployment of resources makes a lot of sense. As you plan the implementation of your OpenStack platform ensuring application availability and performance is a necessary design goal. There are a number of things to consider to this end, for example how do you minimize downtime, or support your legacy applications, as well as your applications that are built for the cloud. You might need to host multiple tenants on your cloud platform, and deliver performance SLAs to them. Larger application deployments might require extending cloud platform services to multiple locations.

To ensure a successful implementation of OpenStack you need design recommendations around best practices for multi-zone and multi-region cloud architectures. There are two major areas to look at. One is resource segregation or ‘pooling’ and the use of cloud platform constructs such as availability zones and host aggregates to group infrastructure into fault domains and high-availability domains. The other is how to use an ADC to provide highly available, highly performant, application delivery and load balancing services in your distributed, multi-tenant, fault-tolerant cloud architecture.

Best Practices for Multi-Zone and Multi-Region Cloud Integration
It’s easier to build resilient and scalable OpenStack data centers if three best-practice rules are applied in planning:
•Segregate physical resources to create fault domains, and plan to mark these as OpenStack Availability Zones.
•Distribute OpenStack and database controllers across three or more adjacent fault domains to create a resilient cluster.
•Networks - Design considerations should include both data plane and control plane networking criteria for scale out and high-availability.

Simplify Integration Of L4 - L7 Services With OpenStack and NetScaler

Many organizations are building private cloud platforms as a way to increase the agility of IT infrastructure and to increase the efficiency of operations to support their business critical applications. Over the past few years we have seen an increasing move towards deploying OpenStack, which is an open source cloud management platform, in production environments.
As organizations use OpenStack to automate the deployment of servers, storage and networking, they are also looking to automate the provisioning of L4 – L7 services. To do this, they need their networking equipment vendors to provide integration of their devices with OpenStack in a way that addresses deployment challenges involved in offering infrastructure-as-a-service. These challenges include scalability, elasticity, performance and flexibility/control over resource allocation.
To enable the automated deployment of application delivery services with OpenStack, Citrix has built NetScaler Control Center as a way to integrate with the LBaaS service in OpenStack. The Citrix LBaaS solution enables IT organizations to guarantee performance and availability service level assurances (SLAs) as well as provide redundancy and seamless elasticity while rapidly deploying line of business applications in OpenSack.

The Challenge with Resource Deployment

OpenStack has come a long way in simplifying the provisioning of computer, storage and networking resources as part of an application deployment workflow. Neutron, which is the networking project for OpenStack, automates the creation and management of L2/L3 networks, as well as the associated L4/L7 network services such as firewalling, load balancing and VPN services. While Neutron has made rapid advancements in enabling a self-service consumption model for networking, there are still operational gaps that need to be addressed for successfully deploying business critical workloads. Some of these gaps include providing for service-aware resource allocation, resource elasticity on demand, monitoring and visibility, fault tolerance and high availability. It is important that cloud providers have complete control over policies that control these operational characteristics, even in fully automated environments.

Dealing with Change in the Data Center - Getting to Network as a Service

We are continuing on a long transition from the physical data center to the virtual data center. Resources that were wholly physical are being virtualized. Resources that were static are now dynamic. This trend started with server virtualization and has expanded to network virtualization. With the move to virtualization you have made progress in gaining better utilization your physical resources. You are using fewer physical servers but they are larger and denser. There are more virtual machines and more network ports to connect them. This has created an exponential growth in the number of interactions that you must make on the network to get everything connected and communicating. The challenge is in the time it takes to get work done. Let’s look at some tools that Juniper provides to make your life easier.

Zero Touch Provisioning
Your first step is to get the equipment up and running. Juniper provides a zero touch provisioning tool that lets you do this using standard configurations for the switches and a DHCP server to assign an IP address and things like that. It’s used by the networking team. It handles routine tasks that are typically done once. With ZTP highly repetitive routing tasks that took hours can be reduced to minutes.

OpenStack Summit San Diego 2012

The OpenStack Summit in San Diego was the place to be last week. I attended and wanted to share my observations. There was a lot of participation and energy. It was sold out with over 1300 people attending and about 35 vendors displaying their products.  Previous summits were developer forums. This time the format was expanded and there were hundreds of sessions in many categories including case studies, industry analysis as well as the usual develop sessions. See, http://openstacksummitfall2012.sched.org/ for a list of the session.

What is Openstack and What Does it Do?
OpenStack (www.openstack.org) is a foundation that manages an open source cloud computing platform. It was founded in 2010 out of a project that was started by NASA and RackSpace to build their cloud infrastructure. Their mission is “To produce the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.” OpenStack focuses on the core infrastructure for compute, storage, images and networking. There is a large ecosystem of vendors providing tools do the things that OpenStack does not do.

OpenStacks consists of modules to configure cloud computing resources. The components are the Nova Compute Service, Swift Storage Service, Glance Image Service and Quantum Network Service. They automate the functions that are required to set up these services. OpenStack lets organizations quickly provision and reprovision compute resources. Even with virtualization it can take days to fully set up a virtual server, networking and storage. Organizations want this to happen in minutes whether they are offering a commercial service or an internal IT service.