Build an OpenStack/Ceph cluster with Cumulus Networks in GNS3: part 2

Adding virtual machine images to GNS3

I’m going to assume that at this stage, you’ve got a fully working (and tested) GNS3 install on a suitably powerful Linux host. Once that is complete, the next step is to download the two virtual machine images we discussed in part 1 of this blog, and integrate them into GNS3.

In my setup, I downloaded the Cumulus VX 4.0 QCOW2 image (though you are welcome to try newer releases which should work), which you can obtain by visiting this link: https://cumulusnetworks.com/accounts/login/?next=/products/cumulus-vx/download/

I also downloaded the Ubuntu Server 18.04.4 QCOW2 image from here: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/bionic/current/bionic-server-cloudimg-amd64.img

Once you have downloaded these two images, the next task is to integrate them into GNS3. To do this:

1. Select Edit > Preferences in the GNS3 interface.
2. When the Preferences dialog pops up, from the left pane select QEMU VMs, then click New.
3. Enter a name for the Image (e.g. Cumulus VM 4.0)
4. Select the Qemu binary, and specify default RAM size for each instance (I used 1024MB). You can override this for each VM you create on the GNS3 canvas, so don’t worry too much about it.
5. Select the Continue reading

Build an OpenStack/Ceph cluster with Cumulus Networks in GNS3: part 1

Introduction

I must have built OpenStack demos a dozen times or more over the past few years, for the purposes of learning, training others, or providing proof of concept environments to clients. However these environments always had one thing in common – they were purely demo environments, bearing little relation to how you would build OpenStack in a real production environment. Indeed, most of them were “all-in-one” environments, where every single service runs on a single node, and the loss of that node would mean the loss of the entire environment – never mind the lack of scalability!

Having been tasked with building a prototype OpenStack environment for an internal proof of concept, I decided that it was time to start looking at how to build OpenStack “properly”. However I had a problem – I didn’t have at my disposal the half-dozen or so physical nodes one might typically build a production cluster on, never mind a highly resilient switch core for the network. The on-going lockdown in which I write this didn’t help – in fact it made obtaining hardware more difficult.

I’ve always been inspired by the “cldemo” environments on Cumulus Networks’ GitHub and my first thought was Continue reading