[one-users] VM Provisioning, opennebula and virt-install/kickstart

[Mick Pollard]

G`day,

On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:00:32 -0500
Jack Jill <jacknjill111 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mick,
> 
> <quote>
> I am wanting to build a 'self serve' VM provisioning tool so my devs can
> pick a client, have that clients environment deployed to a VM for
> dev/testing/staging purposes and it be exactly the same as the clients
> current production environment.
> </quote>
> 
> When you say you want to replicate your client's production environment,
> what exactly are you attempting to replicate? Is it the application software
> such as Ruby, Tomcat, etc. Or even lower level specific stuff such as a
> specific version of openSSH server, etc.
> 
> -- 
> Thanks,
> Rosh
> http://blogs.plexibus.com
> 
I have a yum repos that all my servers point to instead of the RHEL ones. This way I can test updates outside of this environment before adding them to my yum repos.
I the use virt-install and kickstart to install a new VM.

    virt-install --accelerate -n cust01-test -r 256 --vcpus=1 --disk pool=lvm,bus=virtio,size=10 --vnc --os-type linux --os-variant=rhel5 \
    --network=network:default -l http://192.168.122.1/os/CentOS/5.4/os/x86_64/ -x "ks=http://192.168.122.1/ks/cust01.cfg"

The kickstart does a very minimal install and sets the hostname and then installs the puppet client.
Puppet then takes care of building out the environment to match the production environment of the customer.( selects webserver etc )
Currently I monitor this and let the devs know when its ready. I would like to eventually add cucumber-nagios in there or the like to alert devs without me be involved.
The typical lifecycle for a VM for us is measured in days and not months. deploy, modify customers software, test, then push to production and destroy the VM.
I understand opennebula uses images for a reason and it makes sense for the most part (it's distribution agnostic) but it would be nice to have the choice to not always use images.
It would be nice if I could move from running virt-install/virsh and having wiki pages to remember which client is on what node to making use of opennebula.

I am only new to ruby and not quite comfortable at writing something myself although I have looked at the ruby-libvirt bindings and they seem to lack the whole virt-install command set.



-- 
Regards
Mick Pollard ( lunix )
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