Musings On Setting Up A Data Center

Robert Harker
harker at harker dot com

What Goes Into Setting Up A Data Center?

In my conversations about OpenStack and setting up an OpenStack cluster I find that most people assume that there will be a bunch of infrastructure in place.

What infrastructure you ask?

Well to start with the network and the Internet connection.

• Network switches
• VLANs
• Data Center routers
• Internet routers
• Remote power cycling of hardware

Then network services such as:

• DNS
• DHCP
• firewalls
• Maybe a load balancer

What about systems administration support:

• ISO Images and PIX boot servers
• Software repositories
• Puppet or Chef servers

Are you going to keep track of what you do?

• Subversion or some other version control
• A wiki to document what you are doing
• Bugzilla to track bugs and problems

Maybe an LDAP server for user account authentication

What about monitoring and trend analysis:

• Nagios and Cacti
• Zenos

You have software developers right?

• Jenkins to manage builds
• Development environments

Do you want sysadmin tools to run commands and jobs across a fleet of hosts:

• Casandra
• Pogo - a Yahoo tool that is very interesting.

What about security?

• Monitoring of logs
• Monitoring of system configurations
• Monitoring of system traffic

A lot of infrastructure that is assumed to be there when you deploy an OpenStack cluster.

Do you need all of it? No
Is there overlap with services provided by OpenStack? Yes

But setting up an OpenStack cluster has a lot of other requirements than simply OpenStack.

Stay tuned for what I set up for the Silicon Valley Cloud Center.