Special Project – Cisco UCS Plugin for SUSE Cloud

I have recently been involved with some special projects with a few of our Integrated Systems partners, and would like to mention one as an example of the ability of SUSE to work with our partners. The specific example in this case highlights how easy it is to create first level integration between SUSE Cloud and Cisco’s UCS Manager.

This first level integration is a small amount of code written to show off the ability to integrate SUSE Cloud with existing IT infrastructure. The plug-in is basic, but shows how simple it is to leverage the infrastructure provided by a hardware partner like Cisco to create a single pane of glass experience for a cloud admin. While it is not part of the SUSE Cloud product today, it is a first step in showing how SUSE can make enterprise adoption of openstack easier.

First a little detail. If you aren’t familiar with Cisco’s UCS Manager you should go take a look at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10281/index.html. The UCS Manager provides an incredible array of options and interface abilities to the hardware. These options include the ability to create service profile templates. This is key when designing a cloud deployment as a set of templates can be created and utilized for specific functions (compute vs storage) within the cloud.

SUSE Cloud is our openstack offering. The current release (1.0) is based on Essex, while the upcoming 2.0 release will be based on Grizzly. SUSE has focused on building an easily installable and supportable configuration that can be up and running in just a few hours vs several ays. More info can be found here: https://www.suse.com/products/suse-cloud/.

The integration point that was created is to add a tab into the SUSE Cloud admin node that allows a cloud administrator to provision nodes as compute or storage nodes. This action utilizes service profile templates and can be extended quite easily to add more configuration option and actions. The code is common Ruby and available under the version 2.0 Apache license.  If you would like a copy of the plugin and SUSE Cloud, visit with your SUSE technical resource.

As we look towards the SUSE Cloud 2.0 release, we expect more integration work will be done within the community and by our partners. Let’s work together to bring enterprise ready openstack clouds to companies around the world!