Openstack on AARCH64 (arm64)

These are notes on how the OSUOSL is setting up Openstack on AARCH64 (arm64) (as of May 2020).

Summary

We use Chef as our configuration management tool of choice and have created an environment using the OpenStack Chef Cookbooks. The compute nodes are running CentOS 7 and the controller node is an x86 virtual machine running CentOS 7. All storage for the cluster is powered via a Ceph cluster backed by a 10Gb network.

We have created our own site specific wrapper Openstack cookbook that also includes any changes needed to make Openstack run on the AARCH64 (arm64) platform on CentOS 7. It currently requires some private cookbooks to run however we are working on removing those requirements.

Hardware Stack

• Controller (1)

  • One (1) x86_64 Virtual Machine running on Ganeti with KVM

  • 24g RAM / 20g disk / 8 vCPU

• Compute (12)

  • Twelve (12) Ampere Computing eMAG (HR350A) aarch64 systems w/ 128g RAM

• Storage (8)

  • Eight (8) Dell PowerEdge R710

  • 64g RAM

  • 6 x 4TB SATA / 1 x 800GB NVMe

Software Stack

Here is the current deployment of OpenStack on AARCH64 (arm64) we’re using:

• Host Operating System

  • CentOS 7

  • Compute nodes running a mainline 5.4.x kernel

• OpenStack

  • OpenStack Rocky Release

  • Packages from RDO

• Ceph

  • Ceph Mimic Release