OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. OpenStack works with popular enterprise and open source technologies making it ideal for heterogeneous infrastructure. Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem, and users seeking commercial support can choose from different OpenStack-powered products and services in the Marketplace. The software is built by a thriving community of developers, in collaboration with users, and is designed in the open at our Summits.
OpenStack Compute (Nova) is a cloud computing fabric controller, which is the main part of an IaaS system. It is designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources and can work with widely available virtualization technologies, as well as bare metal high performance computing (HPC) configurations. KVM, VMware, and Xen are available choices for hypervisor technology (virtual machine monitor), together with Hyper-V and Linux container technology such as LXC.
Let’s say a cloud provider wants to expand its cloud infrastructure by adding a new physical machine. OpenStack is already managing its cloud, and it wants its new machine to be integrated with OpenStack. KVM and Linux are already running in this new machine.
For a cloud infrastructure, the typical OpenStack configuration includes: a “master” controller node present on a physical machine managing other physical “slave” machines called compute nodes