[Crowbar] Adding support for SUSE

[Ralf Haferkamp]

Am Mittwoch 21 März 2012, 09:00:03 schrieb Victor_Lowther at Dell.com:
> Having an Ubuntu or CentOS admin node deploy OpenStack nodes does not
> really make sense right now -- Crowbar does not support mixed-OS
> clusters.
Hm, interesting. What problems do I have to expect? I am asking because 
the basics seem to work fine so far with just a few adjustments to the 
provisioner barclamp e.g. to have it generate the appropriate pxe config 
for SUSE and to provide a SUSE specific crowbar_join script.
There are of course still some manual steps involved to setup the admin 
node (like copying the install source to the appropriate directory). 
Also note, that this is just meant as a temporary workaround until we 
have the admin node stuff working on SUSE.

> It has been on my to-to list for Crowbar for awhile now,
> but it's priority is low enough that I have not been able to dedicate
> any time to actually implementing it, so implementing mixed OS support
> would be a prerequisite to deploying a SuSE from a CentOS or Ubuntu
> admin node.

> Also, what is the reasoning behind putting all the additional packages
> in one other repo?  I ask because Crowbar used to do this, but it
> would up making ongoing maintenance of the build caches trickier, and
> made it impossible to be able to tar up barclamps + the packages they
> depend on for distribution and hotfix updates.
The thing is that we already have quite some tools and products that 
handle exactly these kind of problems (building packages taking care of 
the dependencies and distributing updates). Ideally we would integrate 
with these tools to distribute updates to the Crowbar Cluster. But this 
is still to be discussed and nothing is set in stone yet. Currently I 
mainly did it this way because it got me much faster to a state where I 
could actually deploy something SLES based with Crowbar.

> These days the
> provisioner barclamp  knows how to serve all of the repositories that
> the other barclamps provide, and the deployer barclamp knows how to
> set up the repositories on all the nodes based on what the provisioner
> can serve.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: crowbar-bounces On Behalf Of Ralf Haferkamp
> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 5:47 AM
> To: crowbar
> Subject: [Crowbar] Adding support for SUSE
> 
> Hi,
> 
> we are currently looking into adding support for SLES into Crowbar. Our
> first goal is get to a state where we can use an existing Admin Node
> (Ubuntu or CentOS based) to deploy OpenStack on SLES11-SP2. (Porting
> the build scripts might then happen at some later point). Does that
> make sense?
> 
> Also we currently plan not include any additional RPMs or gems into the
> barclamps when deploying on SUSE. All of the additional software is
> supposed to come from a single separate repo, which will be added to
> the nodes during install time (via the AutoYaST install profile).
> 
> regards,
> 	Ralf
> 
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