1. case study
IaaS using XCP and XAPI
marco sinhoreli
virtualization project leader
Monday, May 17, 2010

2. about globo.com
• Internet branch of Globo organizations
• Biggest media conglomerate in Latin America and 4th around the world
• Largest vertical web portals in Brazil
• More than 150 million page views per day
• Average of 27 million unique visitors in February 2010
• More than 1500 physical servers in the production datacenter
• More than 60 Gbps internet link
• Considered benchmark for high-volume web distribution
• Responsible for the largest simultaneous video streaming audiences in the country
Monday, May 17, 2010

3. making decisions
• Automate existing manual workflow between teams’ processes
• Keep existing automated systems used for infrastructure setup
• Identify new infrastructure processes to be automated
• The IaaS needs to fit the company and not the reverse
Monday, May 17, 2010

4. new infrastructure processes
Load
Switches
Balancers
NetworkAPI All infrastructure processes
core
are integrated in a single
R EST
core application responsible
REST
for the flux organization.
Each process has an API
I Monitoring
XAP Core application controlling its physical/
logical/virtual resources.
Physical Servers Virtual Machines Deploy
Monday, May 17, 2010

5. networkAPI
• Relationship between server and switch ports
• needed for adding tagged vlan into switch port trunk when a VM is installed or started
• Switch communication by SNMP or SSH
• check/add/remove/list vlans in switch ports
• Load-balancer communication by API or SNMP or SSH
• management of virtual IPs
• Users profiles
• implement policies for human or system users
Monday, May 17, 2010

6. monitoring
• The monitoring is a part of the VM life-cycle
• when the VM is started all information about the VM is included
in the monitoring system and then enabled
• when the VM is stopped or is tagged as “maintenance”, the
monitoring is disabled
• if the VM is removed, the VM monitoring is removed as well
Monday, May 17, 2010

7. deployment
• Used for internal application deployment
• Install all dependencies needed in OS
• Setup the virtual machine for applications
• Policies for users and groups
• Dev/QA/Staging/Production environment
Monday, May 17, 2010

8. motivation to use XCP
• Pooling
• One place to get status and setup all pool virtual resources
• Easy API
• Fast to program and maintain
• Many client bindings for many flavors
• Paravirtualization
• Large and devoted community
Monday, May 17, 2010

9. IaaS front-end component
• Django application running on Apache
• Users access front-end and authentication
• Unifies all others IaaS components
• Defines all workflow and system interactions
Monday, May 17, 2010

10. IaaS xapi integration component
• Django application running on Apache
• VNC console proxy encapsulated with token to identify client
• Translates REST calls from front-end application to native xapi calls
• All calls to XCP pools are only natively accessible from the integration
component
Monday, May 17, 2010

11. host and VM installation
• Hosts
• PXE boot
• answerfile for unattended installation
• rewrite /etc/firstboot.d files to not change the static IPs
• VM
• kickstart for unattended installation integrated into system
• static IP configured by system inserting information on Linux kernel cmdline
Monday, May 17, 2010

12. system view (traditional)
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13. system view (logical)
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14. benefits of this new approach
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15. workflow
• Defines the workflow between teams
• Integrated with ticket system to request an human action
• Keeps the same flux previously used when the actions weren’t
automated
• Checklist of each item to release the resources
Monday, May 17, 2010

16. user profile
• Each profile has a group of actions in the system
• Some profiles inherit group actions of others
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17. user profile
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18. user profile
Project
administrator
Monday, May 17, 2010

19. user profile
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20. user profile
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21. roadmap
• Deployment (Integrate with the IaaS core to tag the deployment in projects)
• DNS (Manage the DNS using an API)
• Monitoring (rich details)
• XCP
• Permit many VMs to use the same shared storage block in web farms
• Master recovery
• Virtual Machine HA
Monday, May 17, 2010

22. thanks
Questions?
Monday, May 17, 2010