[rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event

[Daniel Dumitriu]

Hi,... everyone!

Well, all this sounds very interesting...

Because I am, actually, using Oz to create my images for Nova... Of
course, that doesn't say much because it's, still, a manual process with
no integration.

Perry, this is how things may happen, eventually - and I could be wrong
(I'm known to do that, a lot):

- somebody (Oz ?) creates images for VMs AND kickstarts for physicals;
- somebody (Foreman ?) provisions physicals;
- somebody (Foreman ? Heat ?) manages server profiles (templates ?);
- somebody (Nova with Glance) provisions VMs;
- somebody (Heat?) manages/orchestrates the aggregation of
  profiles (templates) and pushes them as schedules to Nova or
  Foreman...

Except... there's a lot of overlapping, which it is understandable,
given the origins of each project. 

By the way, I keep insisting on Foreman because (despite the trouble I
have with it) it holds the promise of a "real cloud": one that's not
exclusively virtualized.
Also it looks like it is the only one that's focused on managing Puppet
configurations (though Heat might, as well).
Data center operations it would be benefiting a lot from the
streamlining of such an approach (IMHO).

(And I am sooo sorry I cannot dedicate more time and effort to pushing
this stuff forward - my day job, you know...)

Thanks,

Daniel

-- 
___________
Daniel Dumitriu
daniel at dumdan.com
Telephone: +1-416-626-9345
Mobile:    +1-416-318-2487


-----Original Message-----
From: Perry Myers <pmyers at redhat.com>
To: Heron, Rodrique (CTR) WDC31 <Rodrique.Heron at cigna.com>
Cc: daniel at dumdan.com <daniel at dumdan.com>, rhos-list at redhat.com
<rhos-list at redhat.com>, Ohad Levy <ohadlevy at redhat.com>, Ian McLeod
<imcleod at redhat.com>, Steve Loranz <sloranz at redhat.com>, John R. Dunning
<jrd at redhat.com>, Angus Salkeld <asalkeld at redhat.com>, Steven Hardy
<shardy at redhat.com>, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:28:16 -0500

Hi Rodrique and Daniel,

On 12/05/2012 02:08 PM, Heron, Rodrique (CTR) WDC31 wrote:
> I missed the event.

It's actually just recorded presentations, and they are available for 90
days I believe.  So you may still be able to register for the event and
listen to the presentations for a while.

> I am using Foreman, and it would be nice to use Foreman to build images and push them to glance. 

Right, so today Foreman just takes images that already exist and what
you're looking for is a feature enhancement to Foreman that would
integrate with something like Image Factory or Oz to build new VM images
from source media and then push those images into Glance.  Do I have
that right?

> -
> Rodrique Heron
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rhos-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:rhos-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Dumitriu
> Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 1:54 PM
> To: Perry Myers
> Cc: rhos-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: [rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event
> 
> This is just a repeat of the comment/question I left in "The Lounge" of the Event:

Apologies for not being in the lounge today to take the questions live.
 I had another commitment and couldn't attend.

> ==
> Thanks, Perry, for the OpenStack presentation.
> Inciting, to say the least.
> Question: At various points, you did mention "Heat" as an upstream
> project. Could you be more specific on the provisioning side of
> things ?

It's a service similar to Cloud Formations in Amazon AWS.  It provides
the ability to define a template that describes multiple VMs working in
concert.  So you would define a template with 1 or more VM definitions,
and then tell Heat to launch that template.  Heat then uses the
OpenStack Nova APIs to launch the VMs in the proper order, waiting for
things like dependencies in one VM before launching the 2nd.

I've included some of the Heat folks on this thread.  I'm sure they can
do better justice to your question than I could :)

> It would be interesting, for example, to see what could happen if
> "Foreman" would be used to "provision the Cloud". Especially for a
> "private hybrid cloud" that includes both VMs and hardware servers.

Foreman could definitely be used for both bare metal server provisioning
for OpenStack core services and Compute Nodes while also being used to
provision the VMs that will be in the cloud.  I thought that Ohad
(Foreman creator/maintainer) had done some integration work (or maybe it
was just planned) to better integrate Foreman w/ OpenStack from a guest
provisioning perspective (using Fog as an abstraction layer I think)

Ohad, any additional thoughts here?

Perry