I’ve stayed quiet on the subject of Crowbar for a few months, but that does not mean that Crowbar has been.  Activity has been picking up, after Dell pulled resources off, to complete hardware configuration.

[Disclosure: As of 10/3/2014, I am no longer a Dell employee]

With the re-addition of hardware configuration, OpenCrowbar delivers the essential requirements for Ready State and we’ve piloted integration that shows how to drive Crowbar via the API.

From BuildersKnowledge

There has been substantial burn-down on the Broom release theme of hardware workload deliverable which mainly focus on the IPMI/BMC, RAID and BIOS functions working in the framework.  It has required us to add additional out-of-band abstractions (“hammers”) and node abstractions (“quirks”).

We’ve also had a chance to work ahead on the Camshaft release theme of tools integration components like:

•         SaltStack Integration – Crowbar sets up a Salt master and minions on discovered metal (pull request)
•         Chef Metal Integration – a Chef Metal driver talks to the Crowbar API to claim discovered servers from an allocation pool (Judd’s repo).
•         Puppet Integration – Crowbar is able to use the stand-alone mode to execute Puppet manifests on the nodes (as a replacement for Foreman) (puppet sa client).
•         Chef Integration – not new, but worth including in the list so it’s not overlooked! (chef-client install)
• We also added some essential operational configurations including Squid proxy setup and auto configuration and preparing a Consul foundation for future integration with HashiCorp tools

These initial integration are key to being able to bring in OpenStack via Packstack, Chef Cookbooks, or Salt formulas.  Since Crowbar is agnostic about OS, Hardware and Configuration Management tools (Chef, Puppet, Salt), I am seeing interest from several fronts in parallel.  There seems to be substantial interest in RDO + Centos 7 using Packstack or Chef.  Happily, OpenCrowbar.Broom is ready to sweep in those workloads.

There is significant need for Crowbar to deliver ready state under these deployers.  For example, preparing the os, disk, monitoring, cache, networking and SDN infrastructure (OVS, Contrails) are outside the scripts but essential to a sustainable deployment.

These ready state configurations are places where Crowbar creates repeatable cross-platform base that spans the operational choices.