Cloudy Journey: Docker and Cisco Launch Cisco Validated Designs for Cisco UCS and Flexpod Infrastructures on Docker Enterprise Edition [feedly]

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Docker and Cisco Launch Cisco Validated Designs for Cisco UCS and Flexpod Infrastructures on Docker Enterprise Edition
// Docker Blog

Last week, Cisco and Docker jointly announced a strategic alliance between our organizations. Based on customer feedback, one of the initial joint initiatives is the validation of Docker Enterprise Edition (which includes Docker Datacenter) against Cisco UCS and the Nexus infrastructures. We are excited to announce that Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for Cisco UCS and Flexpod on Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) are immediately available.

CVDs represent the gold standard reference architecture methodology for enterprise customers looking to deploy an end-to-end solution. The CVDs follow defined processes and covers not only provisioning and configuration of the solution, but also test and document the solutions against performance, scale and availability/failure – something that requires a lab setup with a significant amount of hardware that reflects actual production deployments. This enables our customers achieve faster, more reliable and predictable implementations.

The two new CVDs published for container management offers enterprises a well designed and an end-to-end lab tested configuration for Docker EE on Cisco UCS and Flexpod Datacenter. The collaborative engineering effort between Cisco, NetApp and Docker provides enterprises best of breed solutions for Docker Datacenter on Cisco Infrastructure and NetApp Enterprise Storage to run stateless or stateful containers.

The first CVD includes 2 configurations:

4-node rack servers Bare Metal deployment, co-locating Docker UCP Controller and DTR on 3 manager nodes in a Highly Available configuration and 1 UCP worker node.

10-node Blade servers Bare Metal deployment, with 3 nodes for UCP controllers, 3 nodes for DTR and remaining 4 nodes as UCP worker nodes

The second CVD was based on FlexPod Datacenter in collaboration with NetApp using Cisco UCS Blades and NetApp FAS and E-Series storage.

These CVDs leverage the Docker native user experience of Docker EE, along with Cisco's UCS converged infrastructure capabilities to provide simple management control planes to orchestrate compute, network and storage provisioning for the application containers to run in a secure and scalable environment. It also uses built in security features of the UCS such as I/O isolation through VLANs, secure bootup of bare metal hosts, and physical storage access path isolation through Cisco VIC's virtual network interfaces. The combination of UCS and Docker EE's built-in security such as Secrets Management, Docker Content Trust, and Docker Security Scanning provides a secure end-to-end Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution.

Both these solutions use Cisco UCS Service Profiles to provision and configure the UCS servers and their I/O properties to automate the complete installation process. Docker commands and Ansible were used for Docker EE installation. After configuring proper certificates across the DTR and UCP nodes, we were able to push and pull images successfully. Container images such as busybox, nginx, etc. and applications such as WordPress, Voting application, etc. to test and validate the configuration were pulled from Docker Hub, a central repository for Docker developers to store container images.

The scaling test included the deployment of containers and applications. We were able to deploy 700+ containers on single node and more than 7000 containers across 10 nodes without performance degradation. The scaling tests also covered dynamically adding/deleting nodes to ensure the cluster remains responsive during this change. This excellent scaling and resiliency tests on the clusters are result of swarm mode, container orchestration tightly integrated into Docker EE with Docker Datacenter, and Cisco's Nexus switches which provides high performance and low latency network speed.

The fail-over tests covered node shutdown, reboot, induce fault at Cisco Fabric Interconnects to adapters on Cisco UCS blade servers. When the UCP manager node was shutdown/rebooted, we were able to validate that users were still able to access containers through Docker UCP UI or CLI. The system was able to start up quickly after a reboot and the UCP cluster and services were restored. Hardware failure resulted in cluster operating in reduced capacity, but there was no single point of failure.

As part of the FlexPod CVD, NFS was configured for Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) nodes for shared access. Flexpod is configured with NetApp enterprise class storage, and NetApp Docker Volume Plugin (nDVP) provides direct integration with Docker ecosystem for NetApp's ONTAP, E-Series and SolidFire Storage. FlexPod uses NetApp ONTAP storage backend for DTR as well as Container Storage management, and can verify Container volumes deployed using NetApp OnCommand System Manager.

Please refer to CVDs for detailed configuration information.