[Crowbar] Adding support for SUSE

Wed Mar 21 11:56:24 CDT 2012

Am Mittwoch 21 März 2012, 10:37:54 schrieb Victor_Lowther at Dell.com:
> Sorry for top-posting -- Outlook, you know.
> 
> The manual fixups you are making to the provisioner and messing around
> with the install sources are among the issues I expect you to
> encounter right now. The other one is that there is no way to tell
> Crowbar what OS you want to deploy -- for now, it is all or nothing.
Ok, I can live with that for now. As I said it's just tempoary until we 
have a working SLES based admin node.

> I tend to approach package management issues in Crowbar from the
> standpoint of the build system -- whenever we add a new OS to Crowbar,
> we have to teach the build system a few things about that OS -- how to
> create a chroot environment, how to fetch packages in such a way that
> all their dependencies are also fetched, and how to create
> repositories.  Once it knows how to do those things for SuSE (using
> zypper or whatever), you can update the barclamp metadata for each
> barclamp to reference the repositories that the barclamp will pull
> packages from, and let the Crowbar build system worry about making
> sure that all the packages you need for each barclamp will be properly
> staged.  This will also make it easier to add online mode to Crowbar
> at some point in the future, so that we can assume that the cluster
> nodes can talk to the Internet (through an appropriately configured
> Squid cache or the like) to get their packages -- this is one of my
> longer-term strategies for reducing the footprint of a Crowbar
> install.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: crowbar-bounces On Behalf Of Ralf Haferkamp
> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:03 AM
> To: crowbar
> Cc: Lowther, Victor
> Subject: Re: [Crowbar] Adding support for SUSE
> 
> 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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> 
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