Home

What is Crowbar?

Crowbar is a platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. It provides server discovery, firmware upgrades, and operating system installation using PXE Boot. It deploys applications on top of functioning operating systems using chef.

release notes & license

News & Events

Crowbar is currently undergoing a refactoring effort on trunk. The stable branch is "Fred"

• Activity
  • Crowbar 2.0 Refactor
  • Preparing minor updates to Fred (called Betty & Wilma)

Downloads

• Rob Hirschfeld's Builds

Documentation

Overview

• Roadmap (and Release-notes)
• Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

Basic Crowbar

• Dell Crowbar Deployment Guide - Fred, 1.3 (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, OpenStack Install)
• Dell Crowbar User's Guide (How to use Crowbar once it's installed)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop Deployment Guide - Fred, 2.0 (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, Cloudera Install)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop User's Guide - Fred, 2.0 (How to use the Crowbar Hadoop barclamps)
• Installing Crowbar (Just the very basics)
• Installing and Running Crowbar in VirtualBox VMs
• Videos (LOTS of great material here!)
• Getting-Started-(Newbie-Guide) (needs work)

Crowbar's Barclamps

• [Barclamp List] (https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/Barclamp-List)

Crowbar and Openstack

• RackSpace Openstack Reference Architecture
• Crowbar-Openstack Networking Visio Diagram
• Nova
  • knife-openstack for Crowbar installs (manage your OpenStack Nova nodes with Chef's awesome tool: "knife"
  • Nova Volume Tips - This is for OpenStack Essex in Crowbar (1.3 OpenStack/1.4 Crowbar)
• Swift
  • Swift deployment tips

Community Support

• Crowbar Mailing List
• To join our Skype Group, contact "DellCrowbar" with the word "barclamp" in the contact request.
• irc.freenode.net #crowbar (we're not there as much as we'd like)
• Don't be shy to contact your Dell representative and ask about Crowbar!

Development

• How to contribute
• Crowbar Tree/Branch Structure
• Automating workflow with the ./dev tool Great guide!
• Developing and Building Crowbar Good Stuff!
• Building Crowbar for Deployment Another Great Guide!
• Tips and Tricks
• Barclamp: create & install steps. (only works on Crowbar 1.1 builds!)
• Packaging Barclamps
• Upgrade Notes

License

The code and documentation is distributed under the Apache 2 license (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html). Contributions back to the source are encouraged.

See what's included: Licenses-for-Components (this is moving the the new documentation system)

History

Crowbar was developed by the Dell CloudEdge Solutions Team (http://dell.com/openstack) as a OpenStack installer (http://OpenStack.org) but has evolved as a much broader function tool. It is a wrapper and orchestrator for Opscode Chef Server (http://opscode.com)

We are working to make this wiki complete, please feel free to update content.