Cisco Edition of OpenStack

Cisco released the Cisco Edition of OpenStack. This contains all the core OpenStack services for Essex and Folsom, along with installation scripts and other open source components to make it easier to install and run in production. Cisco has been an active participant in OpenStack since the early days of the Quantum project. During the Diablo Summit in Santa Clara in April 2012, Cisco merged it’s own NaaS proposal with other vendor and provider blueprints to create the Quantum component of OpenStack. Over the last year and a half, we’ve been significant contributors to OpenStack in the following areas:

• Quantum: Cisco Plugin, Linux Bridge Plugin, Extensions and L3 work
• Horizon: Quantum integration
• Nova: VIF drivers model
• devstack

Where Can I Get the Cisco Edition of OpenStack Packages?
The Cisco Edition of OpenStack can be downloaded from this FTP site, and information on the packages can be found on this wiki. The packages are free and open source. The Cisco Edition of OpenStack is tested on Ubuntu 12.04 with the Cisco Nexus family of switches and Cisco UCS C Series servers. You do not need to run the Cisco Edition of OpenStack on Cisco hardware, but it is validated on this hardware configuration. The Cisco Quantum Plugin supports L2 segmentation using VLAN, and is formulated to work with both Open vSwitch as well as the Cisco Nexus sub-plugin. We are evaluating other versions of Linux (RHEL/CentOS) to be validated as the base Linux version.
Cisco Specific Additions
This edition uses Puppet (Puppet Labs) to automate the deployment of OpenStack services and in the Essex version we’ve included other software components required for running in a production setting. Work was done around service assurance. The compute monitoring stack consists of Nagios, Collectd, and Graphite. Compute performance and metric graphs have been integrated with the OpenStack Horizon dashboard. High availability is supported using the open source components ha-proxy, kickstartd and galera. As was mentioned earlier, all of the components of the Cisco Edition of OpenStack are Open Source components. We will release a similar HA version for Folsom shortly.