Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud - Openstack Support

In support of our Openstack Edition, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC video) is introducing a community supported "Multi-Cloud Acceleration Kit" (MCAK) that extends IAC Starter Edition to enable provisioning of OpenStack clouds as well as vCloud, Amazon EC2 as well as vCenter and UCS blades.

IAC provides both a real service catalog and an orchestration tool that help OpenStack be adopted by the enterprise. IAC provides rich Role-Based Access Control,physical provisioning and adapters to a large variety of back IT systems including help desks, CMDB's, directories and many other systems.

For newScale customers, this means that you can use your service catalog to provide cloud services to a variety of clouds from the same familiar interface.

This SlideShare presentation gives you the highlights,

Cisco Cloud Management and OpenStack from Cisco Data Center

Some important details Support alternative virtual infrastructures in Starter Edition, including:

• VMware Virtual Center
• VMware vCloud Director
• OpenStack Nova Compute
• Amazon EC2

What we are providing:

• Create supporting orchestration abstractions to make it easy and transparent to extend to any cloud
• Use a common model, where possible, to represent cloud objects, properties and methods
• Provide extensions, where necessary, to accommodate VI-specific objects, properties and methods

To achieve this, we provide generic support for multiple virtual infrastructures only. MCAK dDoes not account for hypervisor-specific features (not that they are used in cloud environment. For example, OpenStack supports KVM, Xen or Hyper-V in generic way-- commands are reduced to the common denominator of instantiating instances, managing power state, managing configuration, image snapshots and removal. This table is useful to see the main concepts of CIAC Starter Edition and how they map to different clouds

Platform Type/Property	Vmware vCenter	vCloud Director	OpenStack	Amazon AWS (EC2)
Customer VDC	Full Path	Organization	N/A	N/A
Tenant VDC	Resource PoolDatastore	Organization VDC	Tenant	Account
VLAN Instance	vCenter Network	Org Network	Network ID	Network ID
VM Template	Full Path	VM Template HREF	Image ID	Image ID
Flavor (new)	Server Size Values	Server Size Values	Flavor ID	Flavor Name
User	vCenter User	user@system	Keystone User	Access Key
Password	vCenter Password	vCloud password	Keystone Password	Secret Key

So you can see that in order to support multiple clouds, it's important to find commonalities and account for differences when needed. You can see a full demo video of IAC Starter Edition   MCAK is available now for Cisco IAC Starter Edition 3.0 and 3.0.1. Support for 3.0.4 will be available at the end of the month in this community site.