OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

One of the biggest barriers  for enterprises interested in deploying OpenStack today is the inability to leverage existing assets - including infrastructure, workloads and their inter-relationships. Committing to an OpenStack deployment typically forces IT to start  from scratch, ignoring any important workloads built up over time. This turns out to either be a non-starter for some organizations, or results in them having to run separate silos of existing, critical workloads, alongside a new OpenStack-based private cloud. However, OpenStack can be taught to learn - and leverage - existing enterprise infrastructure, and incorporate it seamlessly into a live private cloud. This enables users to get up and running with a fully functional private cloud, already plumbed with their existing assets. 

Such learning involves not only an initial pass, but also periodic incremental updates to synchronize the enterprise infrastructure view, with OpenStack’s current state model.

In this talk, we will describe how we, at Platform9, moved our existing dev-test workloads, and infrastructure to an OpenStack-based private cloud, running on vSphere, using a set of such changes for Nova, as well as Glance, which entailed: 

- Enabling Nova compute to discover already existing cloud instances
- Enabling Nova Network  to discover and to integrate existing networks
- Enabling Nova Network to dynamically discover host IP addresses
- Enabling Glance to discover already existing VM images and import them into the Glance repository
- Adding capabilities in Openstack to deal with out of band changes in the cloud environment such as deletion of VMs, network and storage reconfigurations

The benefits that these additions provide to enterprises, in terms of being able to leverage their existing infrastructure within a modern self-service private cloud, are immeasurable. So much so that we made this part of the core feature set of the Platform9 cloud, and believe that it would add great value to the OpenStack project.