Thursday 27 June 2013

OpenStack Operation Guide - Provisioning & Deployment

Automatic Deploylment: two ways.

Way 1 - An automated deployment system installs and configures operating systems on new servers, without intervention, after the absolute minimum amount of manual work (physical racking, MAC to IP assignment, power configuration, and so on).

[Installation]
solutions rely on wrappers around PXE boot and TFTP servers for the basic operating system install, then hand off to an automated configuration management system.
The Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE, also known as Pre-Execution Environment; sometimes pronounced "pixie") is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (likehard disks) or installed operating systems.


[configuration]
Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux both include mechanisms for configuring the operating system, including preseed and kickstart, that you can use after a network boot.
Preseeding provides a way to set answers to questions asked during the installation process, without having to manually enter the answers while the installation is running. This makes it possible to fully automate most types of installation and even offers some features not available during normal installations.
Most of the questions asked by DebianInstaller can be preseeded by setting the answers in the debconf database.
The Red Hat Kickstart installation method[1] is used primarily (but not exclusively) by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to automatically perform unattended operating system installation and configuration. Red Hat publishes Cobbler as a tool to automate the Kickstart configuration process. 

A Kickstart file contains a series of options, to be passed to the Anaconda installer, that describes how to set up the system. It may also include custom scripts to be run before or after the installation.
A Kickstart installation[3] follows these four steps:
  1. The machine is booted from a CD/DVD, a USB device or over a network using PXE and the network protocols Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Trivial File Transfer Protocol.
  2. The Kickstart file is downloaded from the boot media or network (most common).
  3. An Anaconda installation is automatically launched and reads the Kickstart file for the location of the Installation Tree. The tree can reside on the boot media or network.
  4. After accessing the Installation Tree, the installer attempts an unattended installation. If any required information is missing from the Kickstart file, or the file is configured incorrectly, the installer may prompt the user for additional information.

Way 2 - Alternatively, you can use an image based approach for deploying the operating system, such as systemimager.

SystemImager is software that automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment.
SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even update from one Linux release version to another!
It can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production enviroment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image with a simple update command!
Some typical environments include: Internet server farms, database server farms, high performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate desktop environments.

areas to be careful"
- Disk Partitioning & RIAD
- Network configuration

Automated Configuration
Puppet
It's coming from Puppet Labs.
Puppet is a tool designed to manage the configuration of Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems declaratively. The user describes system resources and their state, either using Puppet's declarative language or a Ruby DSL (domain-specific language). This information is stored in files called "Puppet manifests". Puppet discovers the system information via a utility called Facter, and compiles the Puppet manifests into a system-specific catalog containing resources and resource dependency, which are applied against the target systems. Any actions taken by Puppet are then reported.

Remote Management

In computingout-of-band management (sometimes called lights-out management or LOM) involves the use of a dedicated management channel for device maintenance. It allows asystem administrator to monitor and manage servers and other network equipment by remote control regardless of whether the machine is powered on, or if an operating system is installed or functional.
By contrast, in-band management like VNC or SSH is based on software that must be installed on the remote system being managed and only works after the operating system has been booted. This solution may be cheaper, but it does not allow access to BIOS settings, or the reinstallation of the operating system and cannot be used to fix problems that prevent the system from booting.
Both in-band and out-of-band management is usually done through the network connection, but an out-of-band management card can use a physically separated network connector if preferred. A remote management card usually has an at least partially independent power supply, and can power the main machine on and off through the network.

- IPMI
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standardized computer system interface used by system administrators for out-of-band management of computer systems and monitoring of their operation.
The development of this interface specification was led by Intel Corporation and is supported by more than two hundred computer systems vendors.[1] CiscoDellHewlett-PackardIntel, and NEC Corporation announced IPMI v1.0 on 1998-09-16, v1.5 on 2001-03-01, and v2.0 on 2004-02-14.


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