On 21st and 22nd of October, we had the pleasure of attending the most significant OpenNebula event of the year: the annual OpenNebula Conf 2019. StorPool’s team was excited to meet the community, participate in the sessions, and learn what is new with OpenNebula, what new features are released and what is the future roadmap. We had a talk of our own on the event led by Venko Moyankov, a solution architect at StorPool Storage. Learn more about his presentation and the event by reading the full article!
OpenNebula Conf 2019 with StorPool and Venko Moyankov
The OpenNebula Conference is one of the most notable events in the community. It is a get together of OpenNebula users. The event helps them to share new knowledge and useful tips on virtualization and cloud management. OpenNebula Conf 2019 was a two-day event at the end of October in Barcelona. It gathered more than 100 of the world’s leading experts and contributors to the technology. The conference was focused on tutorials, hands-on workshops, educational contents, keynotes, and short presentations by community members that kept all the audience focused and interested.
Among the interesting sessions of the 2019’s OpenNebula Conf edition was the OpenNebula Administration tutorial by the cloud engineers of OpenNebula Systems – Christian González García-Muñoz and Alejandro Huertas Herrero. There were also 6 useful workshops, 3 keynotes, and 8 presentations. Our solution architect Venko Moyankov made a great impression with his presentation about nested virtualization and PCI passthrough with KVM and OpenNebula.
OpenNebula Conf 2019: ‘Nested Virtualization with OpenNebula’ by Venko Moyankov
The session, which Venko had on OpenNebulaConf 2019 was about nested virtualization and PCI pass-through. He presented how we at StorPool use nested virtualization and OpenNebula. Venko described what the challenges we faced were and how we solved the problems we encountered. With this presentation, he shared valuable experience with the people, who face the need to use the same implementation.
What is nested virtualization: Nested virtualization is a technique to run virtual machines in other virtual machines – i.e. more than one level of virtualization.
What is the purpose of nested virtualization: The point of the whole VM into VM operation is to gain more flexibility with the cloud infrastructure we already have. We can easily test hundreds of hypervisors and virtual machines without actually having hundreds of physical servers. We can test virtualized environments without the actual hardware in various use cases – API configuration tests, test automation, dynamic environments tests, etc.
Why StorPool created a nested environment?
There are many reasons why you may need to use nested virtualization, but the most common is in a development and testing environment. At StorPool we use extensively nested virtualization in our test and dev lab. StorPool storage software is used in production in many diverse environments, in different clouds like OpenStack, CloudStack, OnApp, OpenNebula, in conjunction with different hypervisors – KVM, Xen, XenServer, Hyper-V, VMWare and on multiple Operating systems at different versions. We need to test StorPool in various configurations of the above, and to be able to reproduce different scenarios that can be found at our customers.
To be able to build the needed environment in a fast and repeatable manner we’ve created a test cloud with OpenNebula and KVM hypervisors. In this cloud, we can set up many different environments in just a few minutes. With this setup, we can bring to life any configuration we need in a couple of minutes. The most important part is that everything is created in a controlled and repeatable way. This helps us get predictable and consistent results for our tests.
See more about how we integrated OpenNebula with KVM hypervisors and nested virtualization in Venko’s presentation:
Nested Virtualization with OpenNebula
Watch the full presentation ‘Nested Virtualization with OpenNebula’ from OpenNebula Conf 2019:
See more about nested virtualization in our useful deep technical article:
Nested virtualization and PCI passthrough with KVM and OpenNebula
StorPool’s integration with OpenNebula
StorPool delivers primary software-defined storage for OpenNebula clouds. We help companies to achieve better productivity and ultimate performance by using commodity hardware and while avoiding vendor lock-in. Our expertise is building high-performance scalable storage that can fit to your technology stack and project needs. StorPool gives more flexibility and possibilities for every company that needs fast and reliable storage infrastructure.
OpenNebula is an enterprise-ready solution for cloud virtualization. The seamless integration of StorPool and OpenNebula helps many companies to offer reliable services and manage them easily. The final result of the symbiosis between StorPool and OpenNebula is a turnkey software stack for building unbeatable public and private clouds.