A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
As part of the work here in the ICCLab not only are we active in the [OCCI working group](http://www.occi-wg.org) but also contributing not only [contributing to its implementation on OpenStack](https://github.com/tmetsch/occi-os) but we also make available our work on automating the install of OpenStack.
This is the presentation that was presented at the [EGI Technical Forum 2012 in Prague](http://tf2012.egi.eu/).
It doesn’t make sense to continually download the same operating system packages when you can cache them along side your Foreman installation. Assuming you use a debian based OS, in order to do this and have a cached copy of all packages you use within your infrastructure simply install apt-cacher.
Just recently the Foreman project released the latest version, 1.0.1. If you are following our previous guide to install 0.4.2 then you should follow this.
So all our work in the previous articles has been leading up to this one. In this article we’ll describe how you can deploy a full multi-node [OpenStack](http://www.openstack.org) cluster beginning from bare metal using [Foreman](http://www.theforeman.org) and [puppet](http://www.puppetlabs.com). Before continuing we should note what exactly ‘bare metal’ is in this context. Bare metal refers to physical server hardware that has not yet been provisioned with an operating system. When provisioning this bare metal, it is assumed that the underlying network has been setup (e.g. L2 configurations).
ICCLabs and GWDG will present on the topic of “From Bare-Metal to Cloud” at EGI Technical Forum 2012 in Prague.
In our [last article](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/07/puppet-and-openstack-part-one/ ) we setup OpenStack using puppet on one node. In this article we’ll look at setting up OpenStack in a clustered environment.
In this guide we’ll explain how you can setup a simple OpenStack all in one installation using puppet. In this guide we’ll be using a virtual machine to simulate the hardware and the official puppetlabs’ OpenStack module.
In [the previous post](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/06/automating-the-icclab-part-two/) we looked at getting Foreman setup and installed. In this post we’ll run through how you can provision bare metal hosts using Foreman. The first thing that we’ll need to do is configuring Foreman for provisioning!
In the world of data centres, automation is not a nice-to-have it’s essential. Sure you could attempt some manual deployment and configuration if you’ve 2 machines to administrate or knock together a custom script in Perl or python if you’ve 30 machines. But what happens when this grows to thousands? This is where the likes of [Puppet](http://puppetlabs.com/), [Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/) and [CFEngine](http://cfengine.com/) come into play. These are the tools for managing deployment of cloud-scale data centres.