Category Archives: Crowbar

Hungry for Nova Cuisine? Adding Chef recipes for OpenStack Nova

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As promised, here’s the other drop in advance of our OpenStack team’s Crowbar release. 

This is the second part of the Swift and Nova recipes that we are intentionally leaking out to the community.

USAGE NOTE: These recipes are designed to work with Crowbar!  They are not intended to stand alone.

As part of our collaboration with Opscode, Matt Ray, has been merging our recipes into his most excellent OpenStack cookbook tree.  If you want to see our unmerged recipes, we’re also posting those to our github. 

In addition to our Swift recipes, you can now check out the Nova recipes.

ADDITIONAL USAGE NOTE: The Matt’s tree is more complete – these are released for reference only.  They will ultimately be maintained as part of the Crowbar.

Cooking up OpenStack Chef recipes with Opscode

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Our OpenStack team here at Dell has been busy getting Crowbar ready to open source and that does not leave much time for blog posts.  We’re putting on a new UI, modularizing with barclamps and creating network options for Nova Cactus.

Sharing is goodHowever, I wanted to take a minute to update the community about Swift and Nova recipes that we are intenionally leaking out to the community in advance of the larger Crowbar code drop.

As part of our collaboration with Opscode, Matt Ray, has been merging our recipes into his most excellent OpenStack cookbook tree.  If you want to see our unmerged recipes, we’re also posting those to our github.  So far, we have the Swift recipes available (thanks to Andi Abes!) with Nova to follow soon.

5/31 Update: These are now online.

Modularizing Crowbar via Barclamps – Dell prepares to open source our #OpenStack installer

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My team at Dell is working diligently to release Crowbar (Apache 2) to the community.

  • We have ramped up our team size (Andi Abes was spotted recently posting on the Swift list).
  • We are collaborating with partners like Rackspace, Opscode and Citrix
  • We brought in UI expertise (Jon Roberts) to improve usability and polish.
  • We are making sure that the code is integrated with our Dell OpenStack Solution (DOSS).
  • We are lining up customers for real field trials.

The single most critical aspect of Crowbar involves a recent architectural change by Greg Althaus to make Crowbar much more modular.  He dubbed the modules “barclamps” because they are used to attach new capabilities into the system.  For example, we include barclamps for DNS, discovery, Nova, Swift, Nagios, Gangalia, and BIOS config.  Users select which combination to use based on their deployment objectives.

In the Crowbar architecture, nearly every capability of the system is expressed as a barclamp.  This means that the code base can be expanded and updated modularly.  We feel that this pattern is essential to community involvement.

For example, another hardware vendor can add a barclamp that does the BIOS configuration for their specific equipment (yes! that is our intent).  While many barclamps will be included with the open source release to install open source components, we anticipate that other barclamps will be only available with licensed products or in limited distribution.

A barclamp is like a cloud menu planner: it evaluates the whole environment and proposes configurations, roles, and recipes that fit your infrastructure.  If you like the menu, then it tells Chef to start cooking.

Barclamps complement the “PXE state machine” aspect of Crowbar by providing logic Crowbar evaluates as the servers reach deployment states.  These states are completely configurable via the provisioner barclamp; consequently, Crowbar users can choose to change order of operations.  They can also add barclamps and easily incorporate them into their workflow where needed.

Barclamps take the form of a Rails controller that inherits from the barclamp superclass.  The superclass provides the basic REST verbs that each barclamp must service while the child class implements the logic to create a “proposal” leveraging the wealth of information in Chef.  Proposals are JSON collections that include configuration data needed for the deployment recipes and a mapping of nodes into roles.

Users are able to review and edit proposals (which are versioned) before asking Crowbar to implement the proposal in Chef.  The proposal is implemented by assigning the nodes into the proposed roles and allowing Chef to work it’s magic.

Users can operate barcamps in parallel.  In fact, most of our barclamps are designed to operate in conjunction.

Reminder: It is vital to understand that Crowbar is not a stand-alone utility.  It is coupled to Chef Server for deployment and data storage.  Our objective was to leverage the outstanding capabilities and community support for Chef as much as possible.

We’re excited about this architecture addition to Crowbar and encourage you to think about barclamps that would be helpful to your cloud deployment.

How OpenStack installer (crowbar + chefops) works (video from 3/14 demo)

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July 24th 2012 Update:

This page is very very old and Crowbar has progressed significantly since this was posted.  For better information, please visit the Crowbar wiki and  review my Crowbar 2 writeups.

August 5th 2011 Update:

While still relevant and accurate, the information on this page does not reflect the latest information about the now Apache 2 released Crowbar code.  In the 4+ months following this post, we substantially refactored the code make make it more modular (see Barclamps), better looking, and multi-vendor/multi-application (Hadoop & RHEL).  If you want more information, I recommend that you try Crowbar for yourself.

Original March 14th 2011 Text:

I’ve been getting some “how does Crowbar work” inquiries and wanted to take a shot at adding some technical detail.   Before I launch into technical babble, there are some important things to note:

  1. Dell has committed to open source release the code for Crowbar (Apache 2)
  2. Crowbar is an extension of Chef Server – it does not function stand alone and uses Chef’s APIs to store all it’s data.
  3. The OpenStack components install is managed by Chef cookbooks & recipes jointly developed by Dell, Opscode and Rackspace.
  4. Crowbar can be used to simply bootstrap your data center; however, we believe it is the start of a cloud operational model that I described in the hyperscale cloud white paper.

LIVE DEMO (video via Barton George): If you’re at SXSW on 3/14 @ 2pm in Kung Fu Salon, you can ask Greg Althaus to explain it – he does a better job than I do.

Here’s what you need to know to understand Crowbar:

Crowbar is a PXE state machine.

The primary function of Crowbar is to get new hardware into a state where it can be managed by Chef.   To get hardware into a “Chef Ready” state, there are several steps that must be performed.  We need to setup the BIOS, RAID, figure out where the server is racked, install an operating system, assign IP networking and names, synchronize clocks (NTP) and setup a chef client linked to our server.  That’s a lot of steps!

In order to do these steps, we need to boot the server through a series of controlled images (stages) and track the progress through each state.  That means that each state corresponds to a PXE boot image.  The images have a simple script that uses WGET to update the Crowbar server (which stores it’s data in Chef) when the script completes.  When a state is finished, Crowbar will change the PXE server to provide the next image in the sequence.

During the Crowbar managed part of the install, the servers will reboot several times.  Once all of the hardware configuration is complete, Crowbar will use an operating system install image to create the base configuration.  For the first release, we are only planning to have a single Operating System (Ubuntu 10.10); however, we expect to be adding more operating system options.

The current architecture of Crowbar (and the Chef Server that it extends) is to use a dedicated server in the system for administration.  Our default install adds PXE, DHCP, NTP, DNS, Nagios, & Ganglia to the admin server.  For small systems, you can use Chef to add other infrastructure capabilities to the admin server; unfortunately, adding components makes it harder to redeploy the components.  For dynamic configurations where you may want to rehearse deployments while building Chef recipes, we recommend installing other infrastructure services on the admin server.

Of course, the hardware configuration steps are vendor specific.  We had to make the state machine (stored in Chef data bags) configurable so that you can add or omit steps.  Since hardware config is slow, error prone and painful, we see this as a big value add.  Making it work for open source will depend on community participation.

Once Chef has control of the servers, you can use Chef (on the local Chef Server) to complete the OpenStack installation.  From there, you can continue to use Chef to deploy VMs into the environment.  Because Chef encourages a DevOps automation mindset, I believe there is a significant ROI to your investment in learning how this tool operates if you want to manage hyperscale clouds.

Crowbar effectively extends the reach of Chef earlier into the cloud management life cycle.

3/21 Note: Updated graphic to show WGET.