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Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

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41–50 of 128 posts

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#41

Slightly relevant: If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them. The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes). Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably runni…

I only have a few servers here and I would love to test open/dev stack here inside a VM, but the script keeps freezing :(

... I am not expecting to deploy or do much on virtual hardware, but, the servers are pretty beefy and I just want to muck around with the management and learn how it works so I can deploy it at a later date.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#42
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does this compare to puppet?

It's an alternative to puppet. Biggest difference is built-in remote execution.

Not exactly, it doesn't have the same goal at all.

From the first line of the script: "stack.sh is an opinionated OpenStack developer installation". It doesn't provide nearly the flexibility of Puppet (or Chef).

Devstack does one thing, and one thing (almost) only: get a simple installation of OpenStack up and running as fast as possible (predominantly for developers to test their modifications against).

Puppet can handle much more complex scenarios, and is really meant to deploy production.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#43
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RabbitMQ is a messaging queue, Erlang based, not sure if it is owned by VMWare. I get the idea that either it is not owned by them, or the description is wrong enough Oddly quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems - beats make and jenkins it seems

> quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems References? I'm curious as to who's doing this and why. I'm trying to think of a reason and not coming up with much.

pybit, my organisations very own rbit.

THink replacing Jenkins not make

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#44
post #34

Slightly relevant: If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them. The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes). Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably runni…

It looks to me like both PayPal and HP Cloud are using http://saltstack.com/ to manage their OpenStack clusters.

Not in hpcloud. At least not the public cluster available via hpcloud.com

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#46
A few things going on here,

1. According to Business Insider (BI), PayPal is using Fuel from Mirantis to manage its OpenStack deployment.

2. BI also announced that Fuel was released on March 25 under the Apache 2.0 License. However, the fuel website points to a form that appears to give free access to fuel under a creative commons attribution, noncommercial, share alike license, with additional licensing options available from Mirantis.

3. To top it all off, the CEO of Mirantis contacted BI and said the information about PayPal migrating over was incorrect and based off of second-hand knowledge (as seen on the update in the bottom).

4. BI also spoke to paypal who stated they are diversifying their VM infrastructure to "enable choice and agility", not replacing VMware.

So, based on all this, it sounds like what really happened is PayPal decided to implement OpenStack to allow for a more diverse internal set of tools to develop infrastructure. A miscommunication occurred somewhere, which resulted in the BI and Forbes story.

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-p...

https://fuel.mirantis.com/

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Diablo version was the first version that really combined the projects. Before Diablo each system had its own auth/user system, api style, ... We've come a long way in 2 years :) Redhat (EPEL/Fedora) and Ubuntu now have built-in packages that are much more solid. That said, the way to think about OpenStack is like you think about the linux kernel. Most people want a distro, not raw source to setup their environme…

I've kept up a little on OpenStack since then and know people that work with the technology. I'm sure the keystone integrated auth system (or whatever it's called now) really improved things, and it seems like people are making really progress with pushbutton deployments using the usual config/orchestration suspects. Congrats! That said I know more people would would be content to manage ESX with ovftool or some home…

What do you mean by "linux kernel without the usual userspace tools"? Openstack runs on a complete system with all the tools you want to install, not some bare kernel machine.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#48

previously @ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5439770

Yep, that was the original source, it didn't gain any traction or comments.

It's pretty interesting, I hadn't heard of OpenStack before, and the company I work for is migrating TO VmWare.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#49
Well, it makes sense... OpenStack is getting better and better with each release and whilst VMWare do add some cool new features every now and then, the price simply sky rockets and you don't really need the new features.

For the customers who do not need much more than basics (e.g. just virtualisation, storage server etc.), it is just so hard to justify the price now.

Just the other day I had a client who wanted basic fault tolerance and by changing versions, the quote goes from 6k to 47k! It is crazy pricing... :(

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#50
post #26

I think this only solves the cost problem. VMware is damn expensive for what it is. I'm not really a fan of virtualization myself. We canned it at our organisation a couple of years ago. We had 30 ESX/vSphere managed hosts across 3 data centers which hosted app servers, web front end servers, virtual load balancers and some other minor infrastructure. The final straw was the upgrade costs. Not only that we had proble…

Virtualization is a requirement for any kind of serious dynamic infrastructure.
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