Description

Installs the Gridcentric VMS+Cobalt platform from Gridcentric's package repository.

See http://docs.gridcentric.com/openstack for instructions on how to obtain access keys and documentation for VMS.

Requirements

This cookbook has been tested with Chef 0.10.12.

Platforms

The host recipes (api, client and compute) were tested against the following platforms:

• Ubuntu-12.04 (Precise Pangolin)

The guest recipe was tested against the following platforms:

• Ubuntu-12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
• Centos 6

All recipes should work on any platform with apt or yum.

Cookbooks

This cookbook is dependent on the following cookbooks:

• apt
• yum

External Dependencies

Gridcentric VMS+Cobalt is installed on a stock Openstack installation newer than the "Diablo" release. This cookbook supports stock Openstack Essex, Folsom or Grizzly installations. This cookbook has been tested against the openstack cookbooks maintained by Rackspace (https://github.com/rcbops/chef-cookbooks).

Attributes

As a rule of thumb, all attributes under "gridcentric" with nil as the default value need to be provided by the user. The easiest way to provide these is to override these attributes in the nodes' environment. Leaving all other attributes at their default values should yield a working installation.

The node["gridcentric"]["os-version"] attribute specifics the Openstack version of the node. Valid values for this attribute are "essex", "folsom" and "grizzly". Recipes make use of this value to select the appropriate package repository. This attribute must be provided.

All the attributes under node["vms"]["sysconfig"] are used to fill in the the corresponding vms parameters in the /etc/sysconfig/vms config file. See the template default/vms.erb for in-line explanations of what these parameters do. The defaults are sufficient for getting a working vms installation in a typical openstack node.

Finally, the attributes under node["gridcentric"]["repo"] specify the package repository location. A private key provided by Gridcentric is required to access some of the packages. The default values specify to the official Gridcentric repositories.

See the inline comments in attributes/default.rb for more information about individual attributes.

Recipes

compute

• Installs the VMS compute packages and the Cobalt compute openstack extension.
• Should be installed on openstack compute nodes.

api

• Installs the Cobalt api packages for servicing VMS requests.
• Should be installed on openstack api nodes.

client

• Installs the Cobalt client side python bindings. Useful for issuing requests to a VMS-enabled openstack cluster.

agent

• Installs the VMS guest packages.
• Should be installed on any instance which will be blessed using VMS.

nfs

• Installs packages to mount an nfs volume
• mounts a node["vms"]["sysconfig"]["shared_volume"] on the node["vms"]["sysconfig"]["vms_shared_path"] mountpoint

dashboard

• Installs the horizon Cobalt plugin to expose VMS actions on the openstack dashboard
• Installs the above mentioned client
• Should be installed on the openstack dashboard node

A note on Ceph

The compute recipe aims to simplify as much as possible the configuration of the VMS software with a Ceph storage cluster, if such combination is desired.

Simply create or choose the RADOS and RBD pools needed to store memory and disk artifacts of a blessed image, respectively. Then specify them through the node["vms"]["sysconfig"]["rados_pool"] and node["vms"]["sysconfig"]["rbd_pool"] attributes.

Your VMS install should now be using Ceph storage.

You can achieve finer-grained configuration through the ["rados_prefix"], ["rbd_prefix"], ["vms_ceph_conf"] and ["vms_ceph_login"] attributes of the ["vms"]["sysconfig"] node. The defaults are usually fine.