chef-bcpc

chef-bcpc is a set of Chef cookbooks and Ansible playbooks that build a highly-available OpenStack cloud.

The cloud consists of a variety of head nodes (OpenStack controller services, Ceph Mons/Mgrs, etcd, RabbitMQ), work nodes (hypervisors) and storage nodes (Ceph OSDs).

Each type of head node runs its core services in a highly-available manner and the roles of these nodes can be converged into a smaller set of hosts. In addition, the roles of work nodes and storage nodes can also be converged together.

Getting Started

The following instructions will get chef-bcpc up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

• OS X or Linux
• Quad-core CPU that supports VT-x or AMD-V virtualization extensions
• 32 GB of memory
• 128 GB of free disk space
• Vagrant 2.1+
• VirtualBox 5.2+ or KVM + libvirtd
• Packer 1.4+
• git, curl, rsync, ssh, jq, make, ansible

NOTE: It is likely possible to build an environment with 16GB of RAM or less if one is willing to make slight modifications to the virtual topology and/or change some of the build settings and overrides. However, we've opted to spec the minimum requirements slightly more aggressively and target hosts with 32GB RAM or more to provide the best out-of-the-box experience.

Local Build

• Choose the topology and hardware configuration of your cluster. You can choose from existing configurations in virtual/topology, or build your own. hardware.yml and topology.yml are used by default. To view a list of tested topologies and hardware configurations please see virtual/README.
• Set the variables in virtual/vagrantbox.json. The variable vagrant_box specifies the Vagrant box we use to build the virtual environment, and vagrant_box_version specifies the version of the Vagrant box. These variables are specified per Ansible inventory group of hosts, and must have a "default" group as is done in the default vagrantbox.json.
• If one would like to build a pre-provisioned custom Packer box and use it as the base box to create the virtual environment, the steps below should be followed:
  • Create virtual/packer/config/variables.json and set the variables. Depends on the virtual machine provider, an example can be found at variables.json.libvirt.example or variables.json.virtualbox.example. This step is essential for building a Packer box that's used as a base box image for building the virtual environment. The variables bcc_apt_key_url, bcc_apt_url and vagrant_cacert are optional, while others must be set. The variable kernel_version specifies the Linux kernel version we'd like to have for the Packer box. While base_box, base_box_version, and base_box_provider specify an official Vagrant box we'd like to use as a baseline for the Packer box, upon which we make further modifications. Last but not least, the variable output_packer_box_name specifies the name we'd like to use when adding the output Packer box to Vagrant.
  • Alternatively, if one has S3 set up and would like to download/upload a packer box, virtual/packer/config/s3.json can be set up to leverage a pre-built packer box. An example can be found at s3.json.libvirt.example or s3.json.virtualbox.example. Run make target make download-packer-box and make upload-packer-box to download/upload a packer box.
  • Run make target make create-packer-box. This will create a Packer box and add it to Vagrant with the name specified by output_packer_box_name.
  • Set the variables in virtual/vagrantbox.json accordingly. When a local custom box built by Packer is used, the variable vagrant_box needs to be set to the name of the Packer box (aka, the same as output_packer_box_name in virtual/packer/config/variables.json), and vagrant_box_version should be set to 0.
  • After these steps, make create all would always use the Packer box, unless virtual/vagrantbox.json is specified otherwise.
  • If the Packer box needs to be updated, we recommend first clean up the old Packer box. To clean up a Packer box, one must first make sure there's no VM using the Packer box by running make destroy, and then run make destroy-packer-box to clean up the Packer box.
• To make changes to the virtual topology without dirtying the tree, copy the hardware.yml and topology.yml to files named hardware.overrides.yml and topology.overrides.yml, respectively, and make changes to them instead.
• If a proxy server is required for internet access, set the variables bcc_http_proxy_url and bcc_https_proxy_url respectively in virtual/packer/config/variables.json.
• If additional CA certificates are required (e.g. for a proxy), set the variables TBD
• From the root of the chef-bcpc git repository run the following command:

Download and install the latest version of Packer

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.6.6/packer_1.6.6_linux_amd64.zip -O ~/packer_1.6.6_linux.zip
sudo apt install unzip
sudo unzip ~/packer_1.6.6_linux.zip -d /usr/local/bin

Create a Python virtual environment (virtualenv) and activate it

python3 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install 'pip>=19.1.1' wheel
pip install PyYaml ansible netaddr pyOpenSSL 'cryptography>=3.0,<38.0.0'

To create a libvirt build (the default), first install the following packages and plugins:

sudo apt-get install build-essential dnsmasq libguestfs-tools libvirt-dev pkg-config qemu-utils
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt vagrant-mutate

Alternatively, to create a VirtualBox build, install the following plugin and set the following environment variables:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=virtualbox
export VAGRANT_VAGRANTFILE=Vagrantfile.virtualbox

Use the following commands to create a virtual build:

make generate-chef-databags
make create-packer-box
make create all

To clean up the build:

make destroy
make destroy-packer-box

You may also want to change CPU model from qemu64 to kvm64 in ansible/playbooks/roles/common/defaults/main/chef.yml

chef_environment:
  name: virtual
  override_attributes:
    bcpc:
       nova:
         cpu_config:
           cpu_mode: custom
           cpu_model: kvm64

To switch from the default libvirt provider to the virtualbox provider, as far as the build is concerned, you can just remove the mutated libvirt box and then set VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER and VAGRANT_VAGRANTFILE environment variables as described above. However since you must also make sure that the different hypervisors don't both try to control the CPU virtualization facilities, it is best to remove the mutated box and then simply reboot your development host.

This would look something like this:

$ rm -rf ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/bento-VAGRANTSLASH-ubuntu-20.04/202206.03.0/libvirt/
$ rm -rf ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/bento-VAGRANTSLASH-ubuntu-22.04/202206.13.0/libvirt/
$ sudo reboot

Hardware Deployment

TBD

Contributing

Currently, most development is done by a team at Bloomberg L.P. but we would like to build a community around this project. PRs and issues are welcomed. If you are interested in joining the team at Bloomberg L.P. please see available opportunities at the Bloomberg L.P. careers site.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Built With

chef-bcpc is built with the following open source software:

• Ansible
• Apache HTTP Server
• BIRD
• Calico
• Ceph
• Chef Infra Server
• Cinc Client
• Consul
• etcd
• HAProxy
• Memcached
• OpenStack
• Packer
• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• PowerDNS
• RabbitMQ
• Ubuntu
• Unbound
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Thanks to all of these communities for producing this software!