Vagrant

Libvirt is the default toolkit to manage virtualization platforms on Linux. Libvirt and qemu is a great combination with Vagrant. It’s the default combination on most Linux systems, also on my favorite - Fedora.

This combination allows for some awesome features and some restrictions. One of the restrictions is that Ubuntu isn’t available as a box, but Debian is. And Debian is the foundation of Ubuntu, and it’s more open than Ubuntu.

The biggest feature is that it allows for more permanent development environments and direct connection to already existing network bridges.

Vagrant is a great way to script development environments for system administrators. It works with full virtualization and is closer to the real hardware than container systems.

There is a bug in the latest version of Ubuntu (Vagrant Box) that makes it hang during boot. It even hangs the VirtualBox and makes the GUI misbehave. The reason is a missing redirect of the console serial device. Console output fills up a buffer and then just hangs.

If you want to use Vagrant with OpenStack, you need to prepare Vagrant with installing the vagrant-openstack-plugin. I had some problems installing it directly through vagrant plugin install. I had to clone it from Github and install it manually.

One time configuration

Install OpenStack plugin in Vagrant

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/cloudbau/vagrant-openstack-plugin
cd vagrant-openstack-plugin
gem build vagrant-openstack-plugin.gemspec
vagrant plugin install vagrant-openstack-plugin-*.gem

Add a dummy box to Vagrant thats needed by the plugin.

vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/cloudbau/vagrant-openstack-plugin/raw/master/dummy.box

Download OpenStack RC file

• Log into OpenStack
• Download OpenStack API RC file
  • Go to Project -> Compute -> Access & Security -> API Access
  • Down RC file by hitting Download OpenStack RC File
  • Put $USER-openrc.sh in your ~/ or somewhere you prefer

Configure a Vagrant VM

Vagrantfile

This is a default generic Vagrant file which starts a m1.tiny flavor image of Ubuntu Utopic. It requires that you already have added your ssh key to OpenStack. Please add your ssh key with the name $USER_ssh_key.

Prototyping and testing configurations and system installations is time consuming on traditional hardware. That is why I started using Vagrant for nearly all development, prototyping and testing. It’s free and really easy to use. If you install VirtualBox sudo apt-get install virtualbox first, you’ll be up and running in no time.

Vagrant do profile itself for developers, but sysadmins has much to gain by using such tools to make life easier for themselves. Automation and reproducibility is key concepts in modern system administration. We need to think more and more like developers, as much as developers need to think more and more like sysadmins.