Applications hosted on OpenStack can scale on demand, but OpenStack deployments are generally static; scaling a deployment up or down typically requires tedious manual intervention. Automated OpenStack provisioning solutions like MaaS, Packstack, FUEL, etc. are geared towards one-time installations where the associated hardware is used only for OpenStack services throughout its lifetime. As a result, the barrier to a company that wants to use OpenStack internally is high, involving a potentially large capital commitment.
We present the Hardware Isolation Layer package (HIL) and Bare Metal Imaging (BMI) solution. (HIL+BMI) allows administrators to rapidly grow/shrink their OpenStackdeployments and lets them reuse any existing hardware with the flexibility to repurpose it for tradition legacy applications. We will share our experience and lessons of hosting multiple OpenStack deployments using (HIL+BMI) in the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC). We will discuss how these software frameworks enable reuse of finite hardware resources in our data-center to host OpenStack instances of varied size and (re)purposes, from student projects to research collaboration to long-running production clusters, alongside non-cloud deployments. We will also present use cases demonstrating how HIL and BMI together can be used to improve resource utilization in multi-tenant Data Centers.
