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In this article we will review all the steps required to deploy NSX 4.0 a Network Virtualisation offering from VMware. We will nest this lab within an OpenStack cloud but you can run the lab anywhere else where you can launch VMs, including vSphere, Virtual Box or VMware Fusion. OpenStack Networking In our environment each kvm VM will be connected to distinct networks using different virtual interfaces. We first have to create four logical networks within our OpenStack cloud. It’s a funny exercice to deploy NSX nested inside NSX ! ...

Ruby is an important tool to have around, Mac OS X already comes bundled with it, but sometimes you need a different version. Mavericks now comes with Ruby 2.0.0-p195, any previous ones comes with 1.8.7 which is very close to end of life. There are lots of alternative to install multiple version of Ruby on your workstation, rvm or rbenv works well for this job but Postmodern have another angle to this problem. Quite similar to the Arch Linux Kiss (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy, chruby is a deadly simple tool to do just that by updating the environment variables: $RUBY_ROOT, $RUBY_ENGINE, $RUBY_VERSION, $GEM_ROOT, $GEM_HOME, $GEM_PATH and $RUBYOPT in just 90 lines of codes. Let’s details how you can install it on your Mac. ...

Matt Ray is the community manager of a project at Chef (formerly Opscode) to unify all efforts around building up Chef Cookbooks for OpenStack deployment. For quite some time lots of people were forking the repository from Rackspace, it created a lot of fragmentation, so Matt is now gathering all around the StackForge repository where everyone can contribute. AT&T, Dell, Dreamhost, Gap, HP, HubSpot, IBM, Korea Telecom, Rackspace, SUSE amongst others are already contributing to this project. In this article we will detail how you can use them to deploy OpenStack on your environment. ...

For quite some time now the Crowbar team have been refactoring their cloud unboxer solution. It is is not yet ready for public consumption, but if you want to see what they’ve got, it’s already possible. Victor Lowther have just released the first CB20 compatible workload which is Ceph, a distributed storage solution from Inktank. This article will build up on the previous one which details the process of building a Crowbar ISO, let see how it differs if you want to see the latest and greatest of Crowbar 2.0. If you really don’t know what we are talking about, just start from the beginning. ...

Crowbar, a great cloud unboxer, is currently evolving at a rapid pace, if you want to see the latest and greatest thing without waiting any longer, you can build your own Crowbar ISO. In this article we’ll show you how to do just that using the Roxy branch which is supposed to support OpenStack Havanna. We will suppose you aren’t planning to contribute to the code, so we won’t use our any personalized Git repository. If you don’t know what’s Crowbar, it’s platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. But if you want to see how it could be used to deploy OpenStack, read our previous article. ...

Chef is an outstanding Ruby based configuration management system. It’s main reason for existance is to automate your infrastructure. It will help you bring your application to life, including all the dependencies like web and app servers, load balancers, dns, ntp, just to name a few. You’ll find hundreds of pre-built cookbooks on the Community web site. If you want to learn Chef the best starting point is the LearnChef web site. Today, we will show you how to quickly setup a Chef infrastructure easily step by step. ...

OpenStack ecosystem grows at a rapid pace, deploying a private cloud starts by choosing the ideal tools for the job. Today we’ll look at what Rackspace have to offer in that space, their Open source Rackspace Private Cloud package enables quick deployment of an OpenStack cloud. If you’re curious about what’s inside this solution, here is the overall architecture. Rackspace Private Cloud supports the main OpenStack projects: ...

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. ...