IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack technical overview
The IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack solution, provides the architecture, software, and mechanisms that deliver OpenStack clouds to your environment quickly.
By installing the IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack product, you receive the tools to easily deploy an OpenStack cloud, made up of an OpenStack controller node and one or more compute hosts. There are various topologies that are provided to help you deploy the nodes, which create your cloud.
- Install IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack on the deployment server.
- Deploy the cloud topology that includes the controller node and
any compute nodes that you want to include.Note: Depending on the topology, there might be more than one controller node. For example, if you are implementing high availability (HA) into your cloud environment.
- Complete additional configuration steps such as creating initial networks and defining secure access to virtual machines.
- IBM Cloud Manager - Dashboard: Intended for use by cloud administrators only.
- IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack APIs and knife commands: Intended for use by cloud administrators only.
- IBM Cloud Manager - Self Service: Intended for users performing operations with the User role.
IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack is designed to get you started quickly, yet provide you flexibility for production level installations. It uses Chef server technology to provide a robust installation and configuration method by using cookbooks, recipes, environments, and roles. Chef provides a client that communicates with the deployment server to install software on remote nodes as well.
This image shows the communication between the IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack components in your cloud.
The deployment server is where you install the IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack solution. This server becomes your Chef server and it stores cookbooks and templates (for example) that are applied to nodes. The nodes use the recipes, templates, and file distributions to do as much of the configuration work as possible on the nodes themselves (and not on the Chef server).
For more detail about specific deployment options, see Selecting a topology.