The work is not yet complete, but I have made a significant amount of progress integrating VMware Big Data Extensions with OpenStack by allowing deployments to occur through the Heat API. The primary objective is to allow a developer (end-user) to deploy any cluster BDE supports through a Heat template within a micro-segmented network. The resource plugin for Heat then hides the fact that the deployment itself is being handled by VMware Big Data Extensions.

It then allows a small piece of JSON code to be inserted into the OpenStack Heat template that looks like this:

 50         "Mesosphere-Cell-0" : {
 51             "Type" : "VirtualElephant::VMware::BDE",
 52             "Properties" : {
 53                 "bde_endpoint" : "bde.localdomain",
 54                 "username" : "[email protected]",
 55                 "password" : "password",
 56                 "cluster_name" : "mesos_heat_api_11",
 57                 "cluster_type" : "mesos",
 58                 "cluster_net" : "mgmtNetwork"
 59             }
 60         }

A topology view of the stack then looks like this:

sneak_peak_mesos

As I said, it is not fully complete right now — you’ll notice the Mesos cell is off by itself on the right-side of the screen capture. The code to attach it to the micro segmented network created in the JSON has not been written yet. But after struggling with Python the last few days (PERL is my preferred language) and working through issues with Heat itself, I made significant progress and wanted to share it with everyone.

As soon as it is ready, I’ll be posting all the code in my GitHub repo and sharing all the pieces that went into writing the resource plugin for Heat.