The Crowbar team (I work for Dell) continues to drive towards “zero day” deployment readiness. Our Hadoop deployments are tracking Dell | Cloudera Hadoop-powered releases within a month and our OpenStack releases harden within three months.

During the OpenStack summit, we cut our Grizzly branch (aka “pebbles”) and switched over to the release packages. Just a reminder, we basically skipped Folsom. While we’re still tuning out issues on OpenStack Networking (OVS+GRE) setup, we’re also looking for community to start testing and tuning the Chef deployment recipes.

We’re just sprints from release; consequently, it’s time for the Crowbar/OpenStack community to come and play! You can learn Grizzly and help tune the open source Ops scripts.

While the Crowbar team has been generating a lot of noise around our Crowbar 2.0 work, we have not neglected progress on OpenStack Grizzly.  We’ve been building Grizzly deploys on the 1.x code base using pull-from-source to ensure that we’d be ready for the release. For continuity, these same cookbooks will be the foundation of our CB2 deployment.

Features of Crowbar’s OpenStack Grizzly Deployments

• We’ve had Nova Compute, Glance Image, Keystone Identity, Horizon Dashboard, Swift Object and Tempest for a long time. Those, of course, have been updated to Grizzly.
• Added Block Storage
  • importable Ceph Barclamp & OpenStack Block Plug-in
  • Equalogic OpenStack Block Plug-in
• Added Quantum OpenStack Network Barclamp
  • Uses OVS + GRE for deployment
• 10 GB networking configuration
• Rabbit MQ as its own barclamp
• Swift Object Barclamps made a lot of progress in Folsom that translates to Grizzly
  • Apache Web Service
  • Rack awareness
  • HA configuration
  • Distribution Report
• “Under the covers” improvements for Crowbar 1.x
  • Substantial improvements in how we configure host networking
  • Numerous bug fixes and tweaks
• Pull from Source via the Git barclamp
  • Grizzly branch was switched to use Ubuntu & SUSE packages

We’ve made substantial progress, but there are still gaps. We do not have upgrade paths from Essex or Folsom. While we’ve been adding fault-tolerance features, full automatic HA deployments are not included.

Please build your own Crowbar ISO or check our new SoureForge download site then join the Crowbar List and IRC to collaborate with us on OpenStack (or Hadoop or Crowbar 2). Together, we will make this awesome.