![]() In a few moments, we will download an official Vagrant guest box to run. Vagrant doesn’t know how to talk to libvirt, so we have to teach that to it. Vagrant has a nice plugin framework, to whom people have contributed lots of very helpful plugins. You need to install the latest official Vagrant from their website (it’s nicely packaged). So, sudo apt-get install vagrant # Nope, not this one, too old. Note that the version of Vagrant in the Ubuntu 14.04 repositories is too old, and it is incompatible with the libvirt plugin. I’ve noticed that there isn’t a good guide on the Internet on how to accomplish something like this, so here’s a quick tutorial. Managing a pool of IPs, which could maybe be solved by having a little Redis server that keeps the list of free IPs.Plus, Vagrant provides an abstraction over KVM: running the same VM on OpenStack, libVirt/KVM, or VirtualBox is just a matter of a command line switch. Here, KVM servers provide the “easy to administrate” part, and Vagrant provides a nice wrapper that makes it easy to deploy and manage VMs, since it provides a clear separation between base boxes (for which there is an extensive repository, a la Amazon AWS) and provisioning. The current lightweight solution: simply running independent KVM/libvirt servers, and manage them via Vagrant. In other words: the overhead servers (puppet muster, JuJu etc) should be kept at minimum, or eliminated. The more VMs we can pack into them, the better. ![]() Efficient: we have >20 fat servers running this little cloud.Easy to use: newcomers should not need to learn any API, and they could not be familiar with virtualization.Debugging faulty servers should be immediate. Easy to maintain: adding and removing host servers should be easily automated.Since we don’t really need all the features of OpenStack, we have been looking for a while for alternative solutions. ![]() Unfortunately, maintaining an OpenStack installation with ever-shifting requirements can become a chore too, as there are lots of moving parts that need to be monitored and occasionally fixed and updated. To make this task easier on us, we have been running an OpenStack shop for quite a while, and we were running Eucalyptus before that. These are pretty cool to run, but setting them up can be quite cumbersome. In my research lab at UCSB, we routinely run large-scale experiments that, essentially, need lots of computation and memory.
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