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.
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.
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.
Tags: Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, cloud, intelligent automation, OpenStack, orchestration, unified management
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