SUSE Cloud OpenStack Lab on AWS Using Ravello

I learned about Ravello Systems in at an event last month in San Francisco. The technology sounded intriguing, and part that really caught me was “we enable customers to run OpenStack in the public cloud.”

It took me a while to wrap my head around that, but the more I learned, the clearer it became. When you think about it, running an OpenStack environment in the public cloud makes perfect sense especially for development, test and training scenarios. Setting up an OpenStack environment is a complex task, even more so if you need to create multiple such environments. That’s exactly the kind of challenge that the public cloud addresses, i.e., resources that can be accessed quickly and repeatedly, without the need for an expensive and complicated local deployment.

That sounded great. But I was thinking that while public clouds provide the necessary infrastructure to allow you to run your VMs, OpenStack itself is a computing platform, and public clouds don’t provide the needed technology to run VMs inside the hosted VMs.

Luckily, Ravello Systems knows how to do that. With their nested virtualization technology, Ravello enables you to run your existing virtual machine workloads completely unmodified in any public cloud, for development and test. In addition, they can also run hypervisors like KVM inside virtual machines on AWS or Google Cloud Platform.

We wanted to check this out and test our OpenStack distribution SUSE Cloud on Ravello. So, using Ravello, SUSE created a blueprint – a full-environment snapshot – of a multi-node SUSE Cloud OpenStack environment. Using these blueprints, we were able to easily setup a multi-node SUSE Cloud OpenStack lab environment on Amazon Web Services in just a few minutes. The cool part about doing this in the public cloud is that you don’t need to find the physical hardware and go through a complex configuration if you just want to try out OpenStack for development, test and trial purposes. And you can easily scale out to a more complex multi-node setup with multiple guest VMs or workloads.

We’ve tested it, and now you can try it as well. We have a blueprint available for a 3-node setup of SUSE Cloud on Ravello, available to try out for non-production use. Just create account with Ravello Systems at www.ravellosystems.com, then send a note to Ravello support to get access to the SUSE Cloud OpenStack blueprint.