virtualization

Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 3

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Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 3

For those of you still following along, we have come a long way in setting up the foundation for a personal virtualization platform. We finished the last post, Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 2, by configuring Vagrant to provision a single container in our Proxmox cluster. Having done that, we now have set the stage for actually using our infrastructure to host multiple containers.

I concluded the last post by saying that this article would be around deploying a multi-node SolrCloud cluster. Well, this is not exactly true. Instead, we will lay the foundation by installing a multi-node ZooKeeper ensemble. We might as well deploy everything following an architecture that resembles a production deployment. My other motivation for starting with ZooKeeper first is that I also intend to run Hadoop and HBase on this infrastructure and HBase also has a dependency on ZooKeeper.

Before we get started, let's review the basic approach and assumptions:

  1. Proxmox will continue to be our target deployment virtualization environment.
  2. Chef, specifically, Chef Zero, will be used as the provisioner for Vagrant.
  3. Our Vagrantfile will be updated to support multiple machines using the multi-machine support in Vagrant.
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Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 2

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Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 2

In my last post, Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 1, we set up Promox 3.4 on a single node on a Dell C6100. Since that post one thing has changed, I was able to get the vagrant-proxmox plugin to work with the latest version of Proxmox (as of this this writing, version 4.4). Given that we are now able to use the latest version, the goals for this article are to:

  1. Install Promox 4.4 on all 4 nodes.
  2. Configure a Promox cluster.
  3. Configure users, groups and ACLs appropriate for Vagrant.
  4. Create a base CentOS 7 template to work with Vagrant.
  5. Install the vagrant-proxmox plugin and provision a CentOS VM.
  6. Demonstrate a Vagrantfile debugging technique when using the vagrant-proxmox plugin. This was critical in solving my problem of getting the plugin to work with Proxmox 4.4 and Linux Containers (LXC).
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Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 1

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Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 1

Roughly one year ago I deployed my dream home network and thought it would be interesting to expand the network to include a virtualization lab for personal as well as work use. In my consulting capacity, I typically have anywhere between 2 and 4 VMs running on my MacBook Pro using VirtualBox. Even with 16 GB of RAM and a 3.1 GHz i7, my system is typically at capacity. Even with this model, I typically have to stop some VMs so that I can start a different set depending on my active project.

My goal was to free up the system resources on my local machine and shift from running VMs locally to a remote environment. While AWS is great for work (as I do not pick up the bill), it is extremely expensive for personal use.  Naturally, this left me to find a low cost hardware solution and run my own virtualization stack.

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