As detailled in the official Crowbar glossary, a barclamp is a set of data, templates and other necessary logic for applying a particular role to a node, or to some set of nodes. Interesting description isn’t it. Let’s dig in the anatomy of a barclamp. For the non anglophone around, here is a real barclamp. As you’ve noticed, Crowbar terminology uses the toolbox vocabulary, you’ll find Jig and other tools around, but that’s for another day. Let’s talk about the Barclamp today. ...

Fourth OpenStack meetup in Paris with a fully booked amphitheater at Epita, amazing growth of the french community. As a reminder, the first meetup happened June 10, 2013 with only 18 participants. OpenStack in production envt / Behind the scene Presenters: Anne Sébastien Han (sebastien-at-enovance.com) and Razique Mahroua (razique.mahroua-at-enovance.com) both Cloud engineers and OpenStack contributors. Upgrades They both told their stories about how they’ve upgraded OpenStack from Cactus to Diablo to Essex to Folsom in a production environment. Networking and User management changed a lot from the early version to the recent ones, it was challenging to upgrade. Few advices, keep in mind to keep a devt environment to check everything before changing anything on your production environment. There is always something that you cannot anticipate. We’ve migrated around 60 instances. ...

Crowbar is a cloud unboxer that use Chef, meaning it can deploy an OpenStack or Hadoop environment in a breeze. In this article we will use the first release candidate, codename pebbles (build 3476) for OpenStack Grizzly to deploy a demo lab running on VMware Fusion. If you don’t know much about Crowbar for OpenStack you can learn about it by reading our previous blog post. Crowbar connect together a lot of moving parts. ...

If you tried to deploy OpenStack by yourself there a huge probability it failed and you may have given up after multiple unsuccessful tries. Some Linux distribution like Redhat or Suse are packaging everything for you to make things easy but today we’ll look at another alternative from Mirantis a company that just got a new round of financing from Redhat, SAP Ventures and Ericsson. This company offers an easy way to build up an OpenStack cloud environment, Fuel 3.0. ...

Last time I spoke about YET infrastructure everything was hosted on HP cloud managed by Chef. This thrid chapter will demonstrate how easy moving to another cloud provider could be when you use such a Configuration Management tool. Installing Knife Rackspace Rackspace Cloud Servers use a different variant of OpenStack when we compare it to HP Cloud. So there is a specific plugin to deal with their cloud. To install it you just need to type: ...

VMware Infrastructure Navigator is a component of vCenter Operations Suite, it’s an application awareness plug-in to the vCenter Server that provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. This article is a condensed howto about installing and configuring VIN version 5.6, released November 29, 2012. ...

Nicira and OpsCode partnered to build an OpenStack cloud at VMware. In this webinar we’ll have the opportunity to get some insight about it. It allows their team to build location independant labs in 50 seconds, provisionned from a self service portal. Principal driver: cost, agility and speed. Operational Efficiency and business velocity were going down due to the inherent complexity of their infrastructure but after the implementation of cloud automation tricks, it all inversed. ...

In our first Boostrap YET article, we’ve seen how we could easily instantiate a new node at HP Cloud using knife hp and some Chef Cookbooks, Roles, … Today we’ll see how we can add Load Balancing into the picture using the HAProxy cookbook. Add HA Proxy cookbook to your chef-repo To install the community version of haproxy cookbook (it’s not the latest one): % knife cookbook site install haproxy NOTE: You could use Librarian-chef or Berkshelf to manage your cookbooks dependencies in a cleaner way. ...