Howto

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: ...

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. ...

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. ...

Last time I spoke about YET infrastructure everything was hosted on HP cloud managed by Chef. This thrid chapter will demonstrate how easy moving to another cloud provider could be when you use such a Configuration Management tool. Installing Knife Rackspace Rackspace Cloud Servers use a different variant of OpenStack when we compare it to HP Cloud. So there is a specific plugin to deal with their cloud. To install it you just need to type: ...

VMware Infrastructure Navigator is a component of vCenter Operations Suite, it’s an application awareness plug-in to the vCenter Server that provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. This article is a condensed howto about installing and configuring VIN version 5.6, released November 29, 2012. ...

In our first Boostrap YET article, we’ve seen how we could easily instantiate a new node at HP Cloud using knife hp and some Chef Cookbooks, Roles, … Today we’ll see how we can add Load Balancing into the picture using the HAProxy cookbook. Add HA Proxy cookbook to your chef-repo To install the community version of haproxy cookbook (it’s not the latest one): % knife cookbook site install haproxy NOTE: You could use Librarian-chef or Berkshelf to manage your cookbooks dependencies in a cleaner way. ...