Openstack

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. ...

Last year I published an article that detailled a deployment of OpenStack Grizzly using Rackspace private cloud solution, let’s update it to the latest 4.2.1 version. You can stick on v4.1.3 if you want to stick on Grizzly instead of OpenStack Havana. First of all let’s details what’s new since version 4.0. The newer 4.2.x branch now support: OpenStack Havana code base. Load Balancing as a Service in OpenStack Networking (Neutron) using the HAProxy service provider. full OpenStack Metering implementation (Ceilometer) OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) is now available as a tech preview with standard Heat and CloudWatch API. It can be enabled afterward by applying the Heat role to the controller node after deployment. Quantum has been renamed to Neutron L3 Agent now available, it enables floating IPs and routers. LVM is now the default provider for Cinder But the biggest evolution is the fact that RackSpace Private Cloud is now declared Production Ready, yeah !!! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

Fourth OpenStack meetup in Paris with a fully booked amphitheater at Epita, amazing growth of the french community. As a reminder, the first meetup happened June 10, 2013 with only 18 participants. OpenStack in production envt / Behind the scene Presenters: Anne Sébastien Han (sebastien-at-enovance.com) and Razique Mahroua (razique.mahroua-at-enovance.com) both Cloud engineers and OpenStack contributors. Upgrades They both told their stories about how they’ve upgraded OpenStack from Cactus to Diablo to Essex to Folsom in a production environment. Networking and User management changed a lot from the early version to the recent ones, it was challenging to upgrade. Few advices, keep in mind to keep a devt environment to check everything before changing anything on your production environment. There is always something that you cannot anticipate. We’ve migrated around 60 instances. ...

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. ...