Kickstack Installation

The basic approach of Kickstack fundamentally relies on these defined roles. Working in the web interface of the Puppet Master, the admin adds the Kickstack nodes to be managed to the appropriate groups and then assigns the desired roles to each node, again in a web interface. The node itself then just needs the agent for Puppet, which implements the defined node configuration (Figure 1). For this process to work, you first need a working Kickstack installation, and this in turn inevitably means having Puppet in place.

Figure 1: Running the Puppet agent on the servers applies the predefined rules.

A Suitable Lab Environment

If you want to build the sample setup described in this article, you do not need tons of hardware: The proposed installation will easily install on four Ubuntu LTS version 12.04 virtual machines. One of these machines is the Puppet Master, simply known as puppet, and the three other computers, Alice , Bob , and Charlie , run the OpenStack installation. Specifically, the VMs, provided in this example by VirtualBox, do not have less than 1GB of RAM. As usual, the more RAM, the merrier.

If you have bare metal at hand, a setup of this kind can be built on real hardware, allowing you to test OpenStack under realistic conditions. The only restriction in such a scenario is that Charlie needs three network ports, whereas Bob and Alice need at least two each. This requirement is determined by the OpenStack network service, Neutron, and not by Kickstack.

Step 1: Puppet

To begin, you need to set up the Puppet infrastructure. The example is based on a classic Puppet architecture comprising a master server and clients that obtain their configuration from that master. For this setup, you need to ensure that the hosts can reach each other by means of a working DNS and that the hostnames of the machines are registered correctly in DNS. After the installation, it is advisable to edit the Puppet installation that exists below /etc/puppet/puppet.conf on Ubuntu. You will want to enable Puppet reports and storage of the Puppet information in a database. Enabling exported resources is also important in a Kickstack context. The configuration parameter required for this is storeconfigs=true. However, the Puppet developers suggest that new users might prefer to use PuppetDB, which produces the same effect and also supports exported resources.

After preparing the Puppet Master, the nodes follow, which also need a puppet.conf instructing them to connect with the Puppet Master. Next, almost all the OpenStack modules required for Kickstack can be found on PuppetForge (Figure 2). The exceptions are the modules for Neutron [4] and Open vSwitch [5]. The module for Glance [6] also had to be installed manually, because the version available on PuppetForge had an annoying bug.

Figure 2: The module list for the Puppet Master makes it clear that Kickstack relies on the OpenStack Puppet modules.