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

[Mick Pollard]

G`day,

I have been evaluating different VM/cloud management tools and so far I am liking Opennebula (it's ruby,has a cli that doesn't really get in the way and takes care of choosing a node for me)

One common thing I am finding, and not a fan of, is that the solutions I have looked at so far all rely on 'images' to be provisioned.

I'll explain my current setup and ideas and hopefully get some feedback.

We are a web development house with many different customers.
We also host all of our customers ourselves.

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.
I have had a quick play with sinatra and the ruby libvirt bindings but would rather write a sinatra portal for my devs that leverages the opennebula framework.

## My current (dev/test/staging) environment ##

* kickstart files shared via HTTP ( one .ks file per customer )
* yum repos shared via HTTP
* LVM storage on each node ( want to eventually move to iSCSI )
* libvirt on each node

## The current life-cycle ##

* use virt-install to install a VM based from the customer's kickstart file and using our yum repos (this repos means the VM has same versions of software as production)
* puppet then takes over and produces a perfect copy of the client's production environment for the devs to work with (dev/test/stage cycle)
* devs use the VM then ask me to destroy it when they are finished

## Notes about the current system ##

* each node is managed individually. makes it hard to turn into a self serve web application
* by using kickstart,my own rpm repos and puppet, the VM is provisioned exactly the same as the customers production environment
* by not using images I don't have to make sure the image is kept in sync with production; ie, software versions etc
* is working well but relies on the lone sysadmin too much


>From what I can see opennebula isn't able to do what I want to achieve right now but is it something that might be possible with some work ?
Would anyone else be interested ?

I know my email is very RHEL/centos specific but we are a RHEL/centos shop however I  don't think much more effort would be needed on top of this to use FAI/preseed etc.


Does opennebula have an irc channel or some other place dev type people might hang out for discussing this sort of thing ?


-- 
Regards
Mick Pollard ( lunix )
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BOFH Excuse of the day:
Undiagnosable Firmware Destruction Problem