Return of the End User: ONUG to Reveal Test Results
Who will pass and who will fail?
Broadcom’s Tomahawk Chips Land on Pica8 Switches
Pica8 is the first to offer Broadcom's high-end switch chip on white box systems.
The Rise of SDx: Software Defines Everything, Especially Cloud Infrastructure
It is finally here! The second post of an eight-part series examines the evolution of the cloud and the trends driving the SDx revolution.
Using PXE with virt-install
In this post, I’ll just share a quick command that can be used to build and install a KVM guest using PXE instead of an ISO image. There’s nothing new here; this is just me documenting a command so that it’s easier for me (and potentially others) to find next time I need it.
I shared how to use the virt-install command to build KVM guest domains in a blog post talking about working with KVM guests. In that post, I used an ISO image with the virt-install command to build the guest domain.
However, there may be times when you would prefer to use PXE instead of an ISO image. To build a KVM guest domain and instruct the guest domain to boot via PXE, you would use this command (I’ve inserted backslashes and line returns to improve readability):
sudo virt-install --name=guest-name --ram=2048 --vcpus=1
--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/guest-disk.qcow2,bus=virtio
--pxe --noautoconsole --graphics=vnc --hvm
--network network=net-name,model=virtio
--os-variant=ubuntuprecise
The key here is the --pxe parameter, which virt-install uses to instruct the guest domain to PXE boot instead of booting from a virtual CD-ROM backed by an ISO image.
Naturally, you’d want to substitute the desired values for the KVM Continue reading
Ansible Collaboration Day at OpenStack Summit
OpenStack has long had a reputation for being difficult to install and manage. This reputation may be a bit overblown, but it's not entirely unwarranted.
The plain truth is that OpenStack has a lot of components, all of which must be working in concert to be successful. A simple misconfiguration in one component can lead to cascading failures throughout the system, which can then be difficult to diagnose and correct.
It's one of the essential problems of managing any distributed system: one must effectively manage both individual components (i.e. configuration) and the relationships between those components (i.e. orchestration).
Ansible is a simple tool that excels at both -- which helps to explain Ansible's surging popularity in the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past year, several OpenStack projects have emerged to take full advantage of Ansible's power and simplicity.
We've been watching with great interest. Now we think it's time to get more directly involved.
On Monday, May 18th, we will hold an Ansible Collaboration Day at the OpenStack Summit. Our collective goal is simple and ambitious: to make the installation and management of OpenStack as simple as we can possibly make it.
The first part of the day will Continue reading
General Howe’s Dog
The morning after a battle — one of the first won by the American army in its battle for freedom from the British Empire — if you happened to be on the scene, you might see an American soldier, under a white flag of truce, struggling with something small he is carrying between the lines. Approaching, you can see the package is, in fact, a small terrier — a dog. If you could read the note the carrier is holding there in his scrip, you would find it says —
General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar, appears to belong to General Howe… October 6th, 1777
So — in the midst of a war that cut people down from their young lives, we find a singular scene of a man carrying a dog across a field to return it to the enemy’s commander. What has any of this to do with the life of an engineer? Perhaps more than you think.
Let me return to a much younger time in my technical life, a time when I was Continue reading