VMware released on march 23rd NSX-v 6.1.3 which now support vSphere 6.0. I was waiting for this release to upgrade my Bulb lab to the latest and greatest, so here am I. In this article, I’ll describe the upgrade process. I’ll start by upgrading NSX to 6.1.3 and continue on by upgrading vCenter Appliance to 6.0. I’m eager to get the latest improvement that both vSphere 6.0 and NSX 6.1.3 offers. ...
For years a big gap existed between embedded OS for smartphone and server operating system. Mark Shuttleworth and his team have been working for quite some time on optimizing their Ubuntu operating system for the smartphone world. Beginning of december, they’ve announced a new transactionnally updated version of Ubuntu optimized for the cloud, the result of their years of working for the embedded world. Snappy is a minimal server image where applications can be upgraded and rolled back atomically. It’s not the only similar initiative, it started with CoreOS, a reachitected Linux OS to run modern infrastructure stacks, but RedHat is also trying to keep up with project Atomic. Snappy can be used to run Docker containers but not only, it’s one of the main differentiator of Canonical solution. ...
Since my last article about Fuel last June 2013, Mirantis have made great progress. It’s now a good time to review the current status of the recently released Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Tech Preview which comes with many new features like complete integration with vCenter and NSX. They’ve also released on Dec 18, 2014 a reference architecture for a deployment integrating with VMware vCenter and NSX. The first time I tried Fuel, I used VMware Fusion to host it. This time, I have a full 3-node vSphere/vSAN cluster up and running which I’ll be using in this article. So it will be a lot closer to a production environment but I won’t be implementating the reference architecture cited above which require bare metal servers for some components and NSX. In this test, everything will be virtualized, which is exactly how VMware Integrated OpenStack VIO is architected. ...
As you’ll see in the following Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP-0453) article, Python 3.4 brings pip and pyvenv by default which is a great move to simplify Python dependencies management by offering a pre-built standard to download and install Python Modules and easily build virtual Python environments. In this article I’ll details how to install Python 3.4.2 from source and I’ll show you how to use pyvenv and pip. Installation from source On Debian, Ubuntu or deritative, first install the pre-requisite to compile Python 3.4 from source ...
My current lab environment is using a three node vSAN cluster which is doing a great job in providing storage to a vSphere 5.5 environment. But guess what, I’d really like to better leverage six terabytes of storage. vSAN only provides low level datastore storage for VMDK but the good news is the recent release of NexentaConnect for vSAN which provide NAS capability on top of vSAN, wow, outstanding idea. So lets do a step by step approach to discover and install it. ...
Since my last post about Rackspace Private Cloud (RPC), a Private cloud solution, so much has changed. RPC version number is now aligning with the OpenStack ones, so they’ve switched from v4 directly to v9. It’s also a good idea for Rackspace to bump up the version number to share with the rest of the world this version does have nothing in common with the earlier one, apart from OpenStack code. RPC v9 is now using Ansible instead of Chef and Linux Bridges instead of Open vSwitch until OVS get more stable for their use case. It seems they had issues with it which justify reverting to Linux Bridges instead. They are commiting on 99.99% API availability, so they better have a stable distrib. ...
For quite some time, I’ve been using a lab based on 1U rackable servers, it was ok but far from perfect. First of all, it consume a fair share of power, generate lots of heat, so it’s really really noisy. Maximum amount of RAM is also an issue with only 16GB supported. So beginning of this year I started the buildout of a new lab with the objective of reducing noise level to around 40 dB, support up to 64 GB RAM per node and simplify things even further by using VMware distributed storage (vSAN) technology. So let me introduce to my newly built Bulb Lab. ...
Over the last few weeks I built a new home lab based on the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F motherboard. Instead of manually configuring the required infrastructure services like DNS, NTP, OpenVPN and DHCP, I’m using Ansible to do all of it, in an easy and repeatable fashion. As a reminder Ansible is a YAML based configuration management tool, it’s agentless, use SSH as a communication medium. It’s simple and efficient. Read our intro article for more details. In this article I’ll details how to install a ISC DHCP server using Ansible. ISC DHCP is production-grade software that offers a complete solution for implementing DHCP servers, relay agents, and clients for small local networks to large enterprises. ...