Questions for the cloud experts - OpenStack Hypertable?

Question

Just trying to wrap my brain around open source cloud.

1) Is OpenStack running on OS like Ubuntu or is Ubuntu running on OpenStack?

2) Running OpenStack - do you get something like Hypertable(BigTable open source)?

3) How is this OpenStack hosted - is it some data center kind of company that hosts OpenStack?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

OpenStack at its very core is basically an API in front of KVM and IPTables.

1) We run OpenStack on 3 compute nodes running Ubuntu which host VMs running Centos 5.7. The compute nodes simply serve has resource pools for storage and CPU/Memory managed by OpenStack and KVM. We have an 4th box running the cloud-controller and network-controller services for OpenStack which track all the compute nodes and route network traffic to the appropriate compute node for a given VM.

2) We don't run OpenStack at large enough scale to need something like Hypertable so I don't know if it's feasible but I know they offer a storage solution as part of the OpenStack suite. http://openstack.org/projects/storage/

3) OpenStack is just the software you need to host your own cloud solution like AWS or RackSpace cloud. There might be companies that host it for you but I'm not sure.

Here is a guide to run OpenStack inside VirtualBox which might help give you an idea of all its working pieces and its best use cases.

http://uksysadmin.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/running-openstack-under-virtualbox-a-complete-guide/

Hope that helps.