OpenStack & KVM: An ideal match for Open Cloud deployments

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE are enterprise IT organizations, which are under pressure to operate more like business units and deliver agile self-service capabilities. Some IT organizations are losing control because developers and end-users are going outside the IT walls for simpler and faster access to on-demand resources. However, this has led to fragmentation and a strong “shadow IT” that is not easy to manage and which introduces new challenges in security and compliance. To solve these problems, enterprise IT organizations are looking to consolidate, to streamline and to control these spinoff services. Organizations are also looking to use their existing infrastructure investments to build their own private cloud.

The answer has proven to be OpenStack.
OpenStack, a massively scalable open source cloud computing solution, allows organizations to automatically deploy, provision and manage compute, storage and networking resources while providing an infrastructure that is highly available, agile, flexible, and scalable at a low cost. OpenStack follows open standards and is supported by a vibrant community of over 1800 developers from over 134 countries. Users of OpenStack include cloud service providers, government organizations and enterprise customers.

According to various OpenStack user surveys, KVM has consistently ranked first as the hypervisor of choice for OpenStack deployments. This ranking makes sense because KVM delivers unparalleled scalability, performance, security, and reliability levels that enable organizations to build automatic, highly resilient and flexible private clouds.

Let’s examine the benefits that KVM brings to OpenStack:
 KVM is part of the Linux fabric.
OpenStack is built on Linux. KVM is a
loadable kernel module that converts the
Linux kernel into a bare metal hypervisor
that inherits all the advantages and
capabilities of Linux. As a bare-metal
hypervisor, KVM doesn’t need extensive
modifications to seamlessly run
OpenStack workloads.

 KVM’s exceptional performance.
According to an industry standard
virtualization performance benchmark
study, SPECvirt_sc2013, the KVM
hypervisor consistently delivers the
highest server performance scores.Cloud
enabled workloads by nature are elastic;
they have to be able to handle
performance spikes without impacting
end-users. KVM’s performance enables
OpenStack users to meet service level
agreements while scaling to meet
demands.

 KVM brings security to the cloud.
Through sVirt and SELinux security
features, KVM enforces mandatory access
control (MAC) to isolate virtual machines
guests from each other and from the
hypervisor. Therefore affected virtual
machines are isolated and they aren’t
allowed to compromise the rest of
the infrastructure. Because
OpenStack’s instances are rapidly
deployed, security can be easily
compromised. Thus KVM’s built-in
security features ensure that OpenStack
clouds are natively secure.

 KVM is highly tunable.
One of the drivers behind OpenStack’s
fast adoption is its ability to enable
organizations to tune diverse classes of
workloads. Horizontal scaling is essential
to support and to meet end user
application demands. Each KVM host can
have 160 logical CPUs and 3TB RAM.
Each KVM hypervisor guest can scale to
160 virtual CPUs with 2TB. Therefore,
instance families benefit from the
combination of OpenStack scheduling
and class driven KVM tuning. The result is
maximum hardware usage efficiency for
cloud operators; predictable and
consistent service levels for cloud
consumers.

 KVM has a strong community of
developers.
Similar to OpenStack, KVM has a strong
development community backed by
industry technology leaders such as OVA
founding members HP, NetApp, Intel, IBM,
and Red Hat. This collaborative
community fosters fast innovation that
is needed to build agile clouds. Because OpenStack and KVM are both built on Linux, KVM and OpenStack Nova developers closely work together to ensure that both platforms are tightly integrated to deliver optimal performance.

As we can see from the above, KVM is the natural choice for OpenStack workloads. If your IT organization is ready to regain control of the infrastructure without sacrificing performance levels, and to meet developers and end-users’ needs while evolving to cost-effective open standards that encourage innovation, consider an OpenStack cloud built on KVM.
Learn more about the Open Virtualization Alliance and our mission to advance
KVM’s awareness:
https://openvirtualizationalliance.org

Visit the Openstack website:
https://www.openstack.org/ to learn how Enterprise organizations are using OpenStack to create agile, cost-effective
and flexible cloud enabled workloads.