The logical model design

Based on the conceptual reflection design, most probably you will have a good idea about different OpenStack core components, which will lay the formulation of the logical design.

We will start by outlining the relationships and dependencies between the service core of OpenStack. In this section we will look at the deployment architecture of OpenStack. We will start by identifying nodes to run an OpenStack service: the cloud controller, network nodes, and the compute node. You may wonder why such a consideration goes through a physical design classification. However, seeing the cloud controller and compute nodes as simple packages that encapsulate a bunch of OpenStack services will help you refine your design at an early stage. Furthermore, this approach will help plan in advance further high availability and scalability requirements, and will allow you to introduce them later in more detail.

Chapter 3, OpenStack Cluster – The Cloud Controller and Common Services describes in depth how to distribute OpenStack services between cloud controllers and compute nodes.

Thus, the physical model design will be elaborated based on the previous theoretical phases by assigning parameters and values to our design. Let's start with our first logical iteration:

Obviously, in a highly available setup, we should achieve a degree of redundancy in each service within OpenStack. You may wonder about the critical OpenStack services claimed in the first part of this chapter: the database and message queue. Why can't they be separately clustered or packaged on their own? This is a pertinent question. Remember that we are still in the second logical phase where we try to pe slowly into the infrastructure without getting into the details. Besides, we keep on going from a generic and simple design to targeting specific use-cases. Decoupling infrastructure components such as RabbitMQ or MySQL from now on may lead to skipping the requirements of a simple design.

What about high availability?
The previous figure includes several essential solutions for a highly-scalable and redundant OpenStack environment such as virtual IP (VIP), HAProxy, and Pacemaker. The aforementioned technologies will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, Openstack HA and Failover.

Compute nodes are relatively simple as they are intended just to run the virtual machine's workload. In order to manage the VMs, the nova-compute service can be assigned for each compute node. Besides, we should not forget that the compute nodes will not be isolated; a Neutron agent and an optional Ceilometer compute agent may run these nodes.

Network nodes will run Neutron agents for DHCP, and L3 connectivity.