Howto

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. ...

Last week we reviewed all the tips & tricks to troubleshoot Open vSwitch and OpenStack Neutron. NSX vSphere (NSX-v) is a different beast, mostly because it leverage VMware Distributed Switch (VDS) instead of Open vSwitch. As a cheatsheet, I’m gathering all the CLI to troubleshoot it over here, for easy cut & past, some commands are damn long. But wait don’t forget the tab completion on our NSX CLI, it’s pretty nice ;) But you have to know where to start, hope this helps. ...

Open vSwitch comes embedded with Linux Kernel 3.3 and up, it became the cornerstone of Network Virtualisation. But if you start having connectivity issues, it’s better to have a great bit of knowledge to really understand it. This article is a cheatsheet that will help you achieve this goal. I hope ;) Open vSwitch features To give you a rough idea of all the greatness of Open vSwitch (OVS), here is a brief feature list, as of version 2.3. ...

Redhat announced a month ago OpenStack Platform 5.0 which officially support VMware NSX 6.0 and vSphere 5.5. In our lab today, we’ll deploy this OpenStack distribution and connect it to NSX and vSphere to see how easy it is and if everything works as expected. By the way it’s not, so beware, this article is just a preview of what’s coming. If you want to reproduce the same setup, you’ll have to wait until VMware officially support RedHat 7.0. This article will be updated accordingly when it will be publicly available. ...

It’s now time to give Ansible a chance to enter the battleground of OpenStack deployer tool. We’ll use Ansible 1.7 and Blue Box playbooks to achieve that goal. If you don’t have Ansible already installed, consult our previous article or the official documentation. You’ll see it’s quite easy. Ansible by itself doesn’t install the Operating system on Bare Metal. But Ansible author, Michael DeHaan, developped Cobbler a PXE solution back when working for Red Hat. So you can use this tool or any other tools like MAAS, Razor to install at least four Ubuntu 12.04 servers. ...