ManageIQ on a Canonical/Ubuntu Openstack Cloud

Question
#1

How well will ManageIQ manage an Openstack infrastructure on top of ubuntu hosts running mostly ubuntu virtual machines (well, and windows vms also).

I did quite a bit of docs reading and searching, and I see very few non-rhel/centos mentions here and there.

Conceptually, ManageIQ seems to me to be mostly agnostic about it, and extensible/customizable, but should I expect headaches making it work in such an environment?

Some features seems more likely trouble candidates:

  • VM introspection for compliance tests, file checks and things like that: If I got it right there is no agent, it reads and undertands the VMs’ block devices. Will it understand an ubuntu OS?

  • Configuration management. Some docs says the providers for these are RH Satellite 6 and Ansible Tower. I have none of these, I have regular ansible, rundeck and Landscape, maybe foreman. How dependent is the rest of ManageIQ on its cfg mgmt feature?

Also, any negative impacts on the service catalog and billing/chargeback? Those are the most interesting features to me, specially in a multi cloud scenario.

Thanks in advance,

Diego

#2

You will need to set up Openstack with specific projects and options (like use Ceilometer), but if the API is standard it should work.
VM introspection is done looking at the filesystem of the VM. You should be able to use it if the filesystem is supported.

Upstream you have a foreman provider… but you will need to add support for the rest with a new provider.

It shouldn’t be a problem for billing and chargeback if you can get C&U data.

So please test it and comment on your results.

Regards

#3

ManageIQ supports Debian and Ubuntu introspections, the file system would just need to be supported by ManageIQ (https://access.redhat.com/node/1548913). As for Configuration management Satellite 6 is based on Foreman and several Foreman plugins so you should be able to integrate with your foreman instance. There are also a few examples of using Ansible Core inside of automate around.

I have personally discovered several different OpenStack Clouds that are not Red Hat based. As long as the APIs are aligned with upstream you shouldn’t have problems discovering Ubuntu OpenStack.