Currently, I am have a VMware vCenter 7 4 node cluster. These are the Lenovo m920q machines with 64GB RAM each. I also have a Synology 4 Disk NAS too.
I deploy standard VMs and Rancher k8s clusters and use full automation (mainly Terraform) to build everything.
Why VMware? Mainly to get experience on it.
Why am I interested in OpenStack? Mainly because I have used it before and really enjoyed that experience as it feels more like a true cloud environment.
So, my question is this… Has anyone switched one way or the other? Were you glad at switching or do you regret it?
If you did switch, what is a good way to setup multi node OpenStack? I see people recommend at least one separate controller vs the compute nodes?
Never used VMWare, but ran OpenStack in my lab ~6 years ago. It’s an awesome bit of tech, but the thing to keep in mind is it very much isn’t a “product” like VMWare. It’s a big pile of python code and config files that mostly kinda sorta work out of the box, but is really aimed at large operators who have full time on staff developers to write custom bits to glue stuff together to make it work with their particular setup
Thanks for that feedback. I also understand and have read that you are basically taking a bunch of tech that is it’s own tech in it’s own and then openstack glued it together (like you are stating).
I also see that there are many different projects in how you can deploy this too. Some say “don’t use ____ if you want multi node” and some are like “this _____ is the easiest to run”. Did you just use whatever Openstack suggested to install or did you use one of these other wrapper projects that helped too? I understand that some of this may have changed from 6 years ago though.
I mostly just followed the official docs, and yeah, stuff will have changed dramatically in the last few years (I’m also better at running a lab than I was at the time, oh well).
Do you need to switch? I thought openstack had connectors to use VMware as hypervisor. So just stock the openstack on top of your current stack.
Don’t “need” to, no. I can put it on top, so that is what I planned to do to POC, but if I like it, I would rather not have software/resources taken up on top of resources. But I am asking if anyone has already done this either direction and their experience.
