Category Archives: Crowbar

OpenCrowbar Multi-OS deploy from Docker Admin

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Last week I talked about OpenCrowbar reaching a critical milestone and this week I’ve posted two videos demonstrating how the new capabilities work.

annealingThe first video highlights the substantial improvements we’ve made testing and developing OpenCrowbar.  By using Docker containers, OpenCrowbar is fast and reliable to setup and test.  We’ve dramatically streamlined the development environment and consolidated the whole code base into logical groups with logical names.

The second video shows off the OpenCrowbar doing it’s deployment work (including setting up Docker nodes!).  This demonstration goes through the new node discovery and install process.  The new annealing process is very transparent and gives clear and immediate feedback about the entire discovery and provisioning process.  I also show how to configure networks (IPv4 and IPv6) and choose which operating system gets installed.

Note: In the videos, I demonstrate using our Docker install process.  Part of moving from Crowbar v2 (in the original Crowbar repo) to OpenCrowbar was so that we could also organize the code for an RPM install.  In either install process, OpenCrowbar no longer uses bloated ISOs with all components pre-cached so you must be connected to the Internet to complete the installation.

OpenStack Deploy Day generates lots of interest, less coding

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Last week, my team at Dell led a world-wide OpenStack Essex Deploy event. Kamesh Pemmaraju, our OpenStack-powered solution product manager, did a great summary of the event results (200+ attendees!). What started as a hack-a-thon for deploy scripts morphed into a stunning 14+ hour event with rotating intro content and an ecosystem showcase (videos).  Special kudos to Kamesh, Andi Abes, Judd Maltin, Randy Perryman & Mike Pittaro for leadership at our regional sites.

Clearly, OpenStack is attracting a lot of interest. We’ve been investing time in content to help people who are curious about OpenStack to get started.

While I’m happy to be fueling the OpenStack fervor with an easy on-ramp, our primary objective for the Deploy Day was to collaborate on OpenStack deployments.

On that measure, we have room for improvement. We had some great discussions about how to handle upgrades and market drivers for OpenStack; however, we did not spend the time improving Essex deployments that I was hoping to achieve. I know it’s possible – I’ve talked with developers in the Crowbar community who want this.

If you wanted more expert interaction, here are some of my thoughts for future events.

  • Expert track did not get to deploy coding. I think that we need to simply focus more even tightly on to Crowbar deployments. That means having a Crowbar Hack with an OpenStack focus instead of vice versa.
  • Efforts to serve OpenStack n00bs did not protect time for experts. If we offer expert sessions then we won’t try to have parallel intro sessions. We’ll simply have to direct novices to the homework pages and videos.
  • Combining on-site and on-line is too confusing. As much as I enjoy meeting people face-to-face, I think we’d have a more skilled audience if we kept it online only.
  • Connectivity! Dropped connections, sigh.
  • Better planning for videos (not by the presenters) to make sure that we have good results on the expert track.
  • This event was too long. It’s just not practical to serve Europe, US and Asia in a single event. I think that 2-3 hours is a much more practical maximum. 10-12am Eastern or 6-8pm Pacific would be much more manageable.

Do you have other comments and suggestions? Please let me know!

Barclamps: now with added portability!

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I had a question about moving barclamps between solutions.  Since Victor just changed the barclamp build to create a tar for each barclamp (with the debs/rpms), I thought it was the perfect time to explain the new feature.

You can find the barclamps on the Crowbar ISO under “/dell/barclamps” and you can install the TAR onto a Crowbar system using “./barclamp_install foo.tar.gz” where foo is the name of your barclamp.

Here’s a video of how to find and install barclamp tars:

Note: while you can install OpenStack into a Hadoop system, that combination is NOT tested.  We only test OpenStack on Ubuntu 10.10 and Hadoop on RHEL 5.7.   Community help in expanding support is always welcome!

Hadoop Crowbar released to open source! (plus AN HOUR of videos!)

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I’m proud to announce that my team at Dell has open sourced our Apache Hadoop barclamps!  This release follows our Dell | Cloudera Hadoop Solution open source commitment from Hadoop World earlier this month.

As part of this release, we’ve created nearly AN HOUR of video content showing the Hadoop Barclamps in action, installing Crowbar (on CentOS), building Crowbar ISOs in the cloud and specialized developer focused builds.

If you want to talk to the Crowbar team.  We’re attending events in Boston 11/29, Seattle 11/30, and Austin 12/8.

Here are links to the videos:

More Hadoop perspectives from Dell:  Joseph George on what it means and  Barton George‘s backgrounder about barclamps.

Greg Althaus at 11/15 Austin Cloud User Group meeting (annotated 90 min audio)

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Greg Althaus did a 90 minute Crowbar deep dive at this week’s Austin Cloud User Group.  Brad Knowles recorded audio and posted it so I thought I’d share the link and my annotations.  There are a lot more times to catch up with our team at Dell in Austin, Boston, and Seattle.

Video Annotations –  (##:## time stamp)

  • 00:00 Intros & Meeting Management
  • 12:00 Joseph George Introduction / Sponsorship
  • 16:00 Greg Starts – why Crowbar
  • 19:00 DevOps slides
  • 21:00 What does Crowbar do for DevOps
    • make it easier to manage
    • make it easier to repeat
  • 24:00 What’s included – how we grow / where to start
  • 27:20 Starting to show crowbar – what’s included as barclamps
    • pluggable / configuration
    • Barclamps!
  • 28:10 What is a barclamp
    • discussion about the barclamps in the base
  • 34:30: We ❤ Chef. Puppet vs Chef
  • 36:00 Why barclamps are more than cookbooks
  • 36:30 State machine & transitions
  • Q&A Section
    • 38:50 Reference Architectures
    • 43:00 Barclamps work outside of Crowbar?
    • 44:15 Hardware models supported
    • 47:30 Storage Queston
    • 49:00 HA progress
    • 53:00 Ceph as a distributed cloud on all nodes
    • 56:20 Deployer has a map of how to give out roles
  • 58:00 Demo Fails
  • 58:30 Crowbar Architecture
  • 62:00 How Crowbar can be extended
  • 63:00 Workflow & Proposals
  • 65:40 Meta Barclamps
  • 71:10 Chef Environments
  • 73:40 Taking OpenStack releases and Environments
  • 75:00 The case for remove recipes
  • 77:33 Git Hub Tour
  • 79:00 Network Barclamp deep dive
  • 84:00 Adding switch config (roadmap topic)
  • 86:30 Conduits
  • 87:40 Barclamp Extensions / Services
  • 89:00 Questions
    • 89:20 Proposal operations
    • 93:30 OpenStack Readiness & Crowbar Design Approach
    • 93:10 Network Teaming
    • 94:30 Which OS & Hypervisors
    • 96:30 Continuous Integration & Tools
    • 98:40 BDD (“cucumberesque”) & Testing
    • 99:40 Build approach & barclamp construction
  • 100:00 Wrap up by Joseph

Building Crowbar post-modularization (15 minute how-to video)

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Note: I’m putting build ISOs and Sledgehammer TARs on crowbar.zehicle.com if you don’t want to follow these steps then download the ISO. We are updating the ISO daily, so don’t assume that you have that latest!

To build Crowbar, you need a Linux machine and access to the internet. The video shows how you can use an Ubuntu 10.10 Rackspace Cloud Server.  We build Crowbar inside our firewall on our PCs too. No matter how you do it, Crowbar is full of fuzzily delicious cloud bits.

For up-to-date instructions, see the Crowbar wiki Build ISO page.


Video of Crowbar Install & Introduction (two 15 min videos)

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These Crowbar videos are the first two in a series of how to setup and use your own local Crowbar dev environment (here’s more info & the ISO).   I used VMware Workstation, but any virtual hosts that support Ubuntu 10.10 will work fine.  We use ESX, KVM and Xen for testing too.

Creating this environment is the basis for learning Crowbar, experimenting with OpenStack and creating your own barclamps.  It’s also a handy way to play with Opscode Chef since it includes a stand alone Chef server.

Some items from the install video that I want to re-emphasize:

  • The admin server REQUIRES >1 GB of RAM (more is better)
  • All other nodes REQUIRE > 512 MB of RAM (more depending on what you install)
  • At least TWO NICS are required.
  • You must disable DHCP on the virtual network because Crowbar has a DHCP server and they will conflict.
  • The login for the Crowbar admin server is openstack/openstack.  You must “sudo -i” before you run the install script.
  • The default url for Crowbar is http://192.168.124.10:3000  (crowbar/crowbar)

Installing Crowbar (15 mins)

Introduction to Crowbar (15 mins)

9/30 Bonus Video: How to change the default networking

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