Chef for OpenStack

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. ...

December 23, 2013 · 7 min · planetrobbie

Deploying Ceph using Crowbar 2.0

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. ...

December 8, 2013 · 9 min · planetrobbie

Building your own Crowbar ISO for OpenStack Havana

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. ...

November 6, 2013 · 9 min · planetrobbie

Opscode Chef 101

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. ...

October 15, 2013 · 11 min · planetrobbie

Deploying OpenStack Grizzly using Rackspace Private Cloud 4.0

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: ...

July 8, 2013 · 11 min · planetrobbie

Anatomy of a Barclamp

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. ...

July 1, 2013 · 5 min · planetrobbie

Deploying OpenStack Grizzly using Crowbar RC1

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. ...

June 24, 2013 · 12 min · planetrobbie

Deploying OpenStack Grizzly using Fuel 3.0

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. ...

June 8, 2013 · 11 min · planetrobbie