sometime around 2007 or 2008 i suddenly had about 200 physical servers dumped in my lap and i had to come up with a complete software infrastructure for these servers. i had to design, implement and maintain them by myself with minimal aid from others.
in this article i wrote down the applications i used back then.
and now with the success of another article of mine talking about building a nested esx lab at home, i decided to see what i could do for a full fledged openstack environment and to document it.
currently my thoughts on the applications required are as follows
application |
function |
openstack | virtualisation; the installer will be rdo-manager |
FreeIPA | dns and directory server |
spacewalk | package repository and patch management |
zenoss | monitoring |
smstools3 | alerting |
gitlab ce | ticketing, documentation and code repository |
jenkins | continuous integration to push code to servers |
elk | remote logging |
ansible | configuration management and self healing scripts |
team pass | password management |
bareos + rear | backup and full system recovery |
cachet | status page |
i intend to document each component's build out and integration with the other components as i go along.
also, just a reminder that i intend to use only open source software where available. note that initially I will be going for standalone servers, and hopefully circle back to reimplement these servers with HA
as for hardware, i want to minimise the budget which means for applications like alerting i am still up in the air on purchasing the necessary hardware and gsm sim card or subscribing to a service on the internet which will do it for me. it might come down to spending $40 or $50 for the hardware vs $5 for a single month's subscription.
fyi, i already own several desktops that could be repurposed for this endeavour. i certainly do not intend to purchase any more. the rdo-manager documentation talks about needing a minimum of 3 physical servers so that should be doable.
as to the order of the installation, i havent quite decided yet. obviously openstack will be first. a question that i need to answer will be how much of this infrastructure will be physical and how much will be virtual. i dont want to fall into a chicken and egg situation and find out that its actually yogurt that i have to look at. yogurt requires that you import a culture from a previous batch. you'd be surprised at what some entreprises have done to bootstrap their environment and i don't want to fall into the same trap.
so keep watching, keep coming back, give me ideas, and help me build this virtual datacenter
1 | Introduction |
2 | The KVM server |
3 | The VM template |
4 | spacewalk |