Personal OpenStack via Crowbar

Crowbar was made to easily deploy OpenStack. Here are two 10 minute videos showing how to install Crowbar:

and then install OpenStack on top of it.

The narrator, Rob Hirscheld, does it all on one physical box using a couple of VMs.

toy cluster

I built a quick lab at home to learn some new cluster tools. I got four Dell OptiPlex 755s (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3G RAM, 50G disk) named James, Lars, Kirk, and Cliff. They are connected with a Cisco 806. As previously documented I am using minicom to reach the Cisco. My next move is to uplink the Cisco to my WRT54G. Time for a crash course in IOS.

Router>show version
Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software 
IOS (tm) C806 Software (C806-K9OSY6-M), Version 12.3(26), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc2)
Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
Copyright (c) 1986-2008 by cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Mon 17-Mar-08 20:31 by dchih

ROM: System Bootstrap, Version 12.2(1r)XE2, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)

Router uptime is 3 hours, 35 minutes
System returned to ROM by power-on
System image file is "flash:c806-k9osy6-mz.123-26.bin"
...
CISCO C806 (MPC855T) processor (revision 0x301) with 30720K/2048K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID JAD05510XLM (908819059), with hardware revision 0000
CPU rev number 5
Bridging software.
2 Ethernet/IEEE 802.3 interface(s)
128K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
16384K bytes of processor board System flash (Read/Write)
2048K bytes of processor board Web flash (Read/Write)

Configuration register is 0x2102

Router>

Good old tape?

The need for large storage that can be very slow is becoming clearer at work. If that data must be kept on site then getting 150T usable (in R1-like config) in 5U via a TS3310 is appealing. So is being able to grow to 2.5 PB in a 41U configuration.

Cisco UCS lsmod on VIC

A UCS blade's most popular daughter card is a VIC which can provide both Fibre and Ethernet connectivity. Support for this hardware is in a vanilla RHEL6 Linux kernel and a screen cap of running lsmod and modinfo on a machine with this hardware is below. This hardware allows you to present virtual Ethernet or HBAs directly to a virtual machine on RHEV. Cisco's name for this is VM-FEX and RedHat has benchmarks on VM-FEX and KVM performance.

Update: Cisco has documentation on Configuring VM-FEX for KVM.

Tried UCS in a Lab

I got to try Cisco UCS in a lab environment yesterday. So far I like it more than my Dells. You can SSH into either fabric interconnect and find NX-OS running:

and use NX-OS to display information about your servers:

The GUI lets you copy information about any object including its XML: