Tag Archives: django

Ganeti Web Manager 0.5 Released

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After nearly a month and a half (42 days) of development since 0.4 was released, the OSUOSL has released Ganeti Web Manager 0.5 today. This second release has some very nice new features included in it:

Read the full ChangeLog for more details.

noVNC Console

My favorite new feature by far is the inclusion of noVNC by default for VNC console access. This removes the Java requirement for your browsers and makes it much easier to use. It works the best using Chrome/Chromium but you can also use Firefox.

noVNC console

New Overview Page

I’m also excited about the new overview pages for users and admins. It makes it much easier to see the usage of your cluster(s) quickly. For users it will show some basic resource/quota usage.

New Overview Page

Upgrading

If you’re upgrading from 0.4 be sure to read the upgrading wiki page and go over the installation page again. We’ve added a few new requirements such as South for database migrations and Twisted for the new VNC Auth Proxy.

Be sure to also check out Peter’s blog post about the 0.5 release as well!

OSUOSL is hiring: Full-Time Developer in Corvallis

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Want to work at the coolest place for open source and support the missions of some of the most important open source projects?

Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab is recruiting a full-time software developer who will analyze, design, and test software code for Ganeti Web Manager, the Protein Geometry Database and several other homegrown Open Source Lab projects. Development at the OSUOSL includes collaborations with academic and research faculty internal and external to OSU.

Reporting to the Operations Manager of the Open Source Lab, the Analyst Programmer will contribute in-depth knowledge of open source software development using languages such as Python, Ruby and Java. The person in this position is responsible for developing and modifying complex software applications, documenting code and development processes, and overseeing student software developers. This position will allow the candidate to interact with many of the open source projects hosted by the OSL. We seek candidates with a high level of initiative, motivation, and a high degree of success in previous endeavors.

To review more a more detailed job description and apply, check out the Analyst Programmer role on Oregon State University’s Jobs page.

Managing Ganeti with finer control

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Lead OSUOSL Developer Peter Krenesky has written an excellent blog post going over how the permission system works in Ganeti Web Manager. A key feature I’m looking forward to using more at the OSUOSL is managing our clusters with the following scenarios:

  • Fully managed - users have no access at all.  Only admins can create, reboot, or modify.
  • Partially managed - users can’t create virtual machines, but they have some limited ability to manage them.
  • Self Service - users can create virtual machines on demand.  They can create and manage their own virtual machines as needed.
  • User Managed Cluster - a user has control of an entire cluster.

The permission system in GWM will enable Ganeti cluster admins the ability to manage each cluster and virtual machine in finer detail. Ganeti by itself doesn’t come with any sort of user access management system, nor should it really. It makes sense to build tools like GWM on top of Ganeti to deal with such situations. I hope to see more features and bug fixes related to the permissions and quota system.

I’d love to see some feedback on how we implemented the system and how we can improve it!

Ganeti Web Manager 0.4 released

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Ganeti Web Manager logo

After three months of development Ganeti Web Manager 0.4 has been released! This project has been developed primarily by the OSU Open Source Lab with help from the folks at GRNET and several Google GCI students. Ganeti Web Manager (GWM) is a Django-based web application that connects to the Ganeti Remote API. It allows Ganeti administrators access to the various common tasks along with incorporating a permission system. GWM has a long ways to go in terms of implementing more of the RAPI features and UI improvements but this first release should be enough to get people to start using it in production. You can download Ganeti Web Manager here.

Features in 0.4:

  • Caching system
  • Permissions system:
    • User & Group management
    • Per cluster/virtual machine permissions
  • Basic VM management: Create, Delete, Start, Stop, Reboot, VNC Console
  • SSH key feed (for a ganeti post-install hook)
  • Basic quota system
  • Import tools

Basic Installation Requirements

GWM has a fairly low requirement footprint and only requires a minimum amount of Django dependencies.

Currently Firefox and Chrome browsers should work well although know that IE will have issues. I certainly hope whoever is using this application has at least Firefox installed. You will need the Java browser plugin in order to the VNC console. The VNC console requires direct access to the VNC port on the VM but we are working with GRNET to add in a VNC Auth Proxy to get around that.

Ganeti compatibility:

  • >= 2.2.x – supported
  • 2.1.x – mostly supported
  • 2.0.x – unsupported but may work
  • 1.x – unsupported

Screenshots:

List all virtual machines on a cluster:

List VMs in a cluster

Creating a new virtual machine form:

Creating a new virtual machine

Virtual machine reation output dynamically updating:

VM Creation output

Virtual machine VNC console using the java client.

VM VNC Console

Upcoming Features

We have lots of features we would like to eventually implement in GWM. You can see many of them on our issue tracker but here’s a summary of notable features we plan to do.

I’m excited to see where Ganeti Web Manager goes. I plan to start rolling it out at the OSUOSL very soon and giving access to some of the projects we host. If you would like to become a contributor to the project, please check us out on IRC in #ganeti-webmgr on Freenode.

Check my blog and Peter’s blog for more updates soon on Ganeti Web Manager.

Ganeti at the OSUOSL

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One of the many large projects I’m working on at the OSUOSL has been migrating all of our virtualization over to Ganeti and KVM. Needless to say its kept me from updating my blog but I hope to make up for it. I thought I would give a rundown of how we use Ganeti at the OSUOSL and where we plan to move forward from there.

So far we have 10 clusters ranging in size from single nodes up to 4 node clusters. Each node is running Gentoo and managed with our cfengine setup. There are approximately 120 virtual machines deployed across all the clusters with the majority (~70) in our production cluster of four nodes. Each node in the production cluster is running between 17 to 18 KVM instances.

Project Ganeti Clusters

Several hosted projects including OSGeo, phpBB, and ECF have their own clusters which we fully manage on the node level. It works well for them as they don’t have to worry about  maintaining the virtualization cluster while giving them the flexibility of deploying dedicated VMs on their own hardware. I’ve been recommending moving towards this direction for current projects and new projects we get requests for. So far it seems to be working well for both the OSUOSL and the projects we host.

Image Deployment

For deployment we use ganeti-instance-image which is something I wrote to help make deployments faster and more flexible. It uses various types of images (tarball, filesystem dump, qemu-img) to unpack a pre-made system and deploy it with networking, grub, and serial fully functional. Creating the images is currently a manual process but I have it semi-automated using kickstart and preseed config files for building systems quickly and predictably. The amazing part is deploying a fully functional VM in under one minute using ganeti-instance-image.

Web-based Management

An upcoming tool that the OSUOSL is working on is a web-based frontend for managing Ganeti clusters called Ganeti Web Manager. Its written using the django framework and connecting to Ganeti via its RAPI protocol. Our lead developer Peter Krenesky and many of our students have been hard at work on this project in the last month and a half.

Some of the goals of this project include:

  • Permission system for users and how they access the cluster(s)
  • Easy VM deployment and management
  • Console access
  • Empower VM users

We’re very close to making our first release of ganeti-webmgr which should include a basic set of features. We still have a lot to work on and I look forward to seeing how it evolves.