Crowbar

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Crowbar is an Open Source solution to quickly provision new services from bare metal servers. Introduction Project initiated at Dell by Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus It was originally built on top of Chef, Opscode Configuration Management Solution but is currently evolving as an agnostic solution to support other configuration management tools like Puppet. Crowbar includes a Ruby on Rails application to easily customize your environment. Crowbar currently support Ruby 1.9.3 with RVM About Crowbar 2 Crowbar2 is actively developed, the objective is to refactor Crowbar. Objectives: Make it easier, safer, faster and more productive to use simplify use of Chef and eliminate Crowbar requirements in our Opscode Chef recipes multiple versions of the same OS running for upgrades Moving to a database, Chef isn’t any more the primary DB for Crowbar objects. It will improve scalability. Moving to Rails 3 Big disk support (enabling UEFI booting in Sledgehammer, will allow drives above 2 TB) Read-on to get more in-depth details about the roadmap to Crowbar 2. ...