Ganeti is a very powerful tool but often times people have to look for spare hardware to try it out easily. I also wanted to have a way to easily test new features of Ganeti Web Manager (GWM) and Ganeti Instance Image without requiring additional hardware. While I do have the convenience of having access to hardware at the OSU Open Source Lab to do my testing, I’d rather not depend on that always. Sometimes I like trying new and crazier things and I’d rather not break a test cluster all the time. So I decided to see if I could use Vagrant as a tool to create a Ganeti test environment on my own workstation and laptop.

This all started last year while I was preparing for my OSCON tutorial on Ganeti and was manually creating VirtualBox VMs to deploy Ganeti nodes for the tutorial. It worked well but soon after I gave the tutorial I discovered Vagrant and decided to adapt my OSCON tutorial with Vagrant. Its a bit like the movie Inception of course, but I was able to successfully get Ganeti working with Ubuntu and KVM (technically just qemu) and mostly functional VMs inside of the nodes. I was also able to quickly create a three-node cluster to test failover with GWM and many facets of the webapp.

The vagrant setup I have has two parts:

1. Ganeti Tutorial Puppet Module
2. Ganeti Vagrant configs

The puppet module I wrote is very basic and isn’t really intended for production use. I plan to re-factor it in the coming months into a completely modular production ready set of modules. The node boxes are currently running Ubuntu 11.10 (I’ve been having some minor issues getting 12.04 to work), and the internal VMs you can deploy are based on the CirrOS Tiny OS. I also created several branches in the vagrant-ganeti repo for testing various versions of Ganeti which has helped the GWM team implement better support for 2.5 in the upcoming release.

To get started using Ganeti with Vagrant, you can do the following:

git clone git://github.com/ramereth/vagrant-ganeti.git
git submodule update --init
gem install vagrant
vagrant up node1
vagrant ssh node1
gnt-cluster verify

Moving forward I plan to implement the following:

• Update tutorial documentation
• Support for Xen and LXC
• Support for CentOS and Debian as the node OS

Please check out the README for more instructions on how to use the Vagrant+Ganeti setup. If you have any feature requests please don’t hesitate to create an issue on the github repo.

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