A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
An academic entity – more concretely, a research laboratory – resembles a stateful function: It receives input and generates output based on both the input and on previously generated knowledge and results. The input is typically a mix of fancy ideas, industry necessities, as well as funding and equipment. The output encompasses publications, software and […]
Joyent recently open sourced the IaaS Platform SmartDataCenter and the Object Storage Manta, the software they use for their own service offerings. So, what’s all the buzz about? Why should you be excited? Why is it even worth talking (or in this case, writing) about SDC when we have OpenStack? In this blog post I will cover […]
The relocation of the ICCLab hardware and the integration of 9 additional nodes is now complete. The whole movement was done within one day thanks to the support of Pietro, Philipp and Michael (Thanks Guys!).
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.
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.
Here in the ICCLab, the framework of choice is OpenStack, which enjoys significant industry and academic support and is reaching good levels of maturity. The lab will support pre-production usage scenarios on top of OpenStack services as well as experimental research on OpenStack technology and extensions. Currently the actively deployed OpenStack services are the OpenStack compute service (including […]
Puppet is an infrastructure automation system for the efficient management of large scale infrastructures. Using a declarative approach puppet can manage infrastructure lifecycles from provisioning, configuration, update and compliance management. All of these management capabilities are managed logically in a centralised fashion, however the system itself can be implemented in a distributed manner. A key […]
[OpenStack](http://www.openstack.org) is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack is the infrastructure management framework that is currently powering [the ICCLab research infrastructure](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/research/foundation/projects/the-init-cloud-lab/). Schlagwörter: iaas, […]