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The PetaSolutions Blog
Welcome, dear reader, to the Peta Solutions Blog. “Another blog?”, you ask – yes very much so… Let me start by providing a bit of background to who we are and what we are doing, this might help set the...
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Doing the right thing
I am returning from GridKA school, held annually at the KIT in Karlsruhe, where I co-hosted a two day workshop on installing OpenStack with Antonio Messina and Tyanko Alekseiev from the university of...
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Adding 60 Terabytes to a Ceph Cluster
[Note: This post was republished from the now-defunct “petablog”] BCC – an Experiment that “Escaped the Lab” Starting in Fall 2012, we built a small prototype “cloud” consisting of about ten commodity...
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Is there a chance for a Swiss Academic Cloud?
At our recent ICT Focus Meeting where SWITCH customers and SWITCH employees meet to discuss the needs of customers, Edouard Bugnion, one of the founders of VMware and now professor for Computer Science...
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Buffering issues when publishing Openstack dashboard and API services behind...
At SWITCH we operate SWITCHengines, a public OpenStack cloud for Swiss universities. To expose our services to the public Internet, we use the popular open source nginx reverse proxy. For the sake of...
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SWITCHengines upgraded to OpenStack 2014.1 “Juno”
Our Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering SWITCHengines is based on the OpenStack platform. OpenStack releases new alphabetically-nicknamed versions every six months. When we built...
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Hack Neutron to add more IP addresses to an existing subnet
When we designed our OpenStack cloud at SWITCH, we created a network in the service tenant, and we called it private. This network is shared with all tenants and it is the default choice when you start...
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Impressions from 19th TF-Storage workshop in Pisa
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) such as SWITCH exist in every European country. They have a long tradition of working together. An example for this are Task Forces on different topics...
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Server Power Measurement: Quick Experiment
In December 2015, we received a set of servers to extend the infrastructure that powers SWITCHengines (and indirectly SWITCHdrive, SWITCHfilesender and other services). Putting these in production...
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Upgrading a Ceph Cluster from 170 to 200 Disks, in One Image
The infrastructure underlying SWITCHengines includes two Ceph storage clusters, one in Lausanne and one in Zurich. The Zurich one (which notably serves SWITCHdrive) filled up over the past year. In...
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Backport to Openstack Juno the CEPH rbd object map feature
How we use Ceph at SWITCHengines Virtual machines storage in the OpenStack public cloud SWITCHengines is provided with Ceph. We run a Ceph cluster in each OpenStack region. The compute nodes do not...
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The future on SWITCHengines
Together with partners in the universities, SWITCH builds academic services based on our OpenStack based cloud infrastructure. For a non-technical overview, read the article on the SWITCH website.Filed...
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New version, new features
We are constantly working on SWITCHengines, updating, tweaking stuff. Most of the time, little of this process is visible to users, but sometimes we release features that make a difference in the user...
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IPv6 Finally Arriving on SWITCHengines
As you may have heard or noticed, the Internet is running out of addresses. It’s time to upgrade from the 35 years old IPv4 protocol, which doesn’t even have a single public address per human on the...
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SDN/NFV Paradigm: Where the Industry meets the Academia
On Thursday, 16th of June 2016, the Software Defined Networking (SDN) Switzerland community met up for their SDN Workshop collocated with the Open Cloud Day at ZHAW, School of Engineering in...
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SWITCHengines Under the Hood: Basic IPv6 Configuration
My last post, IPv6 Finally Arriving on SWITCHengines, described what users of our IaaS offering can expect from our newly introduced IPv6 support: Instances using the shared default network (“private”)...
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Tuning Virtualized Network Node: multi-queue virtio-net
The infrastructure used by SWITCHengines is composed of about 100 servers. Each one uses two 10 Gb/s network ports. Ideally, a given instance (virtual machine) on SWITCHengines would be able to achieve...
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IPv6 Address Assignment in OpenStack
In an inquiry “IPv6 and Liberty (or Mitaka)” on the openstack mailing list, Ken D’Ambrosio writes: > Hey, all. I have a Liberty cloud, and decided for the heck of it to > start dipping my toe...
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Hosting and computing public scientific datasets in the cloud
SWITCH offers a cloud computing service called SWITCHengines, using OpenStack and Ceph. These computing resources are targeted to research usage, where the demand for Big Data (Hadoop, Spark) workloads...
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Deploy Kubernetes on the SWITCHengines Openstack cloud
Increasing demand for container orchestration tools is coming from our users. Kubernetes has currently a lot of hype, and often it comes the question if we are providing a Kubernetes cluster at SWITCH....
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