Virtual Machine 'farms'?

[Alex Satrapa-2]

Me again!

Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using  
VMWare or VirtualBox?

I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs  
based on a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off  
fripperies such as USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can  
then boot and take over using a configuration management system such  
as Chef.

What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your  
own virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which  
make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively  
easy?

Alex

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[Daniel Pittman]

Alex Satrapa <grail@...> writes:

> Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using VMWare or
> VirtualBox?

A little.

> I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs based on
> a template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off fripperies such as
> USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can then boot and take over
> using a configuration management system such as Chef.
>
> What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your own
> virtual machine experiments?

Two bits of advice:

One, it is much easier to treat the VM as a bit of real hardware, and make
sure it boots from the network when first run.  Then you can use the same OS
deployment tools that you use for the rest of your systems to build it,
including setting up post-install chef, etc, work.

Two, non-ESX VMWare is actually pretty trivial to work with: their
configuration files are pleasantly plain-text, and tend to just work.  Season
a template configuration with a tiny bit of sed or so and you have it.

I understand that the ESXi? options support more or less the same, only using
their API, although I have not done that personally.  Um, or their Perl API.

> Are there any existing tools which make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy
> experimentation relatively easy?

libvirt set out explicitly to enable this.  I believe they have some VMWare
support, but they certainly have VirtualBox.  Driving their API may be easier
than driving the per-vendor API.

        Daniel

Now, my turn: what platform(s) are you using Chef on, and how did you manage
deployment?  We have puppet, but the limited language for node and service
definition is a source of ongoing frustration; Chef looks better...

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[Robert Brockway-3]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Alex Satrapa wrote:

> What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your own
> virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which make this
> kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively easy?

I've used a lot of different virtualisation technologies and normally
build some sort of templating system using scripts.  Grab network config
from dhcp and you're all set.

If you're just wanting Linux virtual machines you may want to look at
OpenVZ which produces containers.  The limitations are that they can only
run Linux and they all use the same kernel as the host system.  The
advantage is that it is very efficient.  Similar technologies are
integrated in to Solaris & FreeBSD, among others.

Cheers,

Rob

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[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Alex

----- "Alex Satrapa" <grail@...> wrote:

> Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using  
> VMWare or VirtualBox?
>
> I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs  
> based on a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off  
> fripperies such as USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can
> then boot and take over using a configuration management system such
> as Chef.
>
> What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your
> own virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which  
> make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively  
> easy?

At Open Query we have a few test/build environments that use VMs.
One type is on KVM and the other uses Xen.

Apart from other magic tools, it's fairly easy to clone an existing VM, all you have is some configuration and a disk image. With a disk image, you can of course mount it in the host or from another VM and change anything you like on the filesystem (like IP adress, etc).
That is fast and effective.

Cheers,
Arjen.
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[Alex Satrapa-2]

On 15/10/2009, at 23:28 , Daniel Pittman wrote:

> One, it is much easier to treat the VM as a bit of real hardware,  
> and make
> sure it boots from the network when first run.  Then you can use the  
> same OS
> deployment tools that you use for the rest of your systems to build  
> it,
> including setting up post-install chef, etc, work.

I don't have "the rest of your systems". I have three computers with a  
plethora of virtual machines.

"the rest of your systems" are for computer geeks who think the 90s  
were cool. I can say that now because I threw out 8 pre-pentium  
systems at the last big computer recycling day.

> Two, non-ESX VMWare is actually pretty trivial to work with: their
> configuration files are pleasantly plain-text, and tend to just work.

Yup, I'm quite happy with that. There's the MAC address, right there!  
It's so easy :)

> libvirt set out explicitly to enable this.

Will investigate, thanks for the tip.

> Now, my turn: what platform(s) are you using Chef on

None yet.

I have a bunch of virtual machines, one which has recently been set up  
as a PXE server (but that service will be migrated to the host Real  
Soon Now™ along with the Chef server.

The next step is to get all the way from non-existent virtual machine  
to booted, OS installed, chef client installed, machine visible in  
iClassify.

This is all part of the talk I'm planning to give in a couple of weeks  
(or whenever I've been shuffled to in the programme). I'm doing an  
Isaac Asimov, one might say.

Alex

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[Alex Satrapa-2]

On 15/10/2009, at 23:41 , Arjen Lentz wrote:

> Apart from other magic tools, it's fairly easy to clone an existing  
> VM, all you have is some configuration and a disk image.

What I've been doing recently is duplicating a (bare bones Debian  
installed) VMware guest, editing the MAC address, adding the new  
address to the DHCP server, booting the client with its new hostname  
and then customising it from there.

Chef gives me some hope, and then there's this whole "pre-seeding"  
thing I want to explore too. Which raises the question of how much do  
I want to do before the guest boots, and how much do I want to be able  
to do in a repeatable fashion without relying on having access to the  
disk outside the booted guest (after all, the disk might be a physical  
disk in another machine in a cluster, which kinda nixes the clone/edit  
MAC/boot paradigm)

Alex

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[Daniel Pittman]

Alex Satrapa <grail@...> writes:

> On 15/10/2009, at 23:28 , Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> One, it is much easier to treat the VM as a bit of real hardware, and make
>> sure it boots from the network when first run.  Then you can use the same OS
>> deployment tools that you use for the rest of your systems to build it,
>> including setting up post-install chef, etc, work.
>
> I don't have "the rest of your systems". I have three computers with a
> plethora of virtual machines.
>
> "the rest of your systems" are for computer geeks who think the 90s were
> cool. I can say that now because I threw out 8 pre-pentium systems at the
> last big computer recycling day.

Ah.  I thought this was work related rather than personal; I think I
mis-assumed the scale of your deployments and all.  Most businesses that get
to the stage of benefiting from virtual machines, in my experience, are
already past the stage of wanting a network deployment tool. :)

[...]

>> Now, my turn: what platform(s) are you using Chef on
>
> None yet.
>
> I have a bunch of virtual machines, one which has recently been set up as a
> PXE server (but that service will be migrated to the host Real Soon Now™
> along with the Chef server.
>
> The next step is to get all the way from non-existent virtual machine to
> booted, OS installed, chef client installed, machine visible in iClassify.
>
> This is all part of the talk I'm planning to give in a couple of weeks (or
> whenever I've been shuffled to in the programme). I'm doing an Isaac Asimov,
> one might say.

OK, cool.  Well, I shall keep an eye out for comments, or swearing, about chef
from you, I guess. :)

        Daniel
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[Andrew Janke]

> Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using VMWare or
> VirtualBox?

> I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs based on
> a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off fripperies such as
> USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can then boot and take over
> using a configuration management system such as Chef.

I use FAI for such games on Debian/Ubuntu for build testing. A simple
C/L install from no to go takes about 2-3 minutes. (The apt mirror is
local via NFS).

I once got into the game of cloning images and the likes but given the
speed of the install and the likes I just don't bother anymore and
make a new one each time.  Incidentally I use the same FAI PXE boot,
install and reboot method for installing ream machines too.  Keeps
things simple as it makes things very easy to test.


a (still loving my SSDs')
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[Steve Walsh-2]

Alex Satrapa wrote:
> Me again!
>
> Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using
> VMWare or VirtualBox?
yup, using Xen and some VMWare ESX/vSphere
>
> I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs
> based on a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off
> fripperies such as USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can
> then boot and take over using a configuration management system such
> as Chef.
I run my current dev environment on a RHEL/Centos Base, and using the
instructions from the Centos Wiki [1] along with kickstart, can have a
VM built and ready for puppet cert-signing in about 4 minutes. I'm sure
you could probably get the same thing done with Debian Pre-seeding, but
Xen sadly does not support PXE on paravirt guests, so you need to kind
of do some work with the kernel, ramdisk and options to get it to play ball.
>
> What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your
> own virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which
> make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively easy?
We're starting to move towards using the VCenter server for controlling
all the ESX servers, which has the ability to template deployments, but
I have not played with that.

Steve
[1] http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU

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