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By Adam, December 11, 2014 3:28 pm

Once again, SUSEcon was a blast! Thanks to everyone who helped make it such a great success, especially all our customers and partners who attended.

If you attended the final Thursday keynote, you should have been given a free USB stick preloaded with a bootable SUSE Cloud appliance. And if you missed out or couldn’t attend, download a copy here! This makes it possible for anyone to build an OpenStack cloud from scratch extremely quickly and easily. (In fact, it’s almost identical to the appliance we used a few weeks ago to win the “Ruler of the Stack” competition at the OpenStack summit in Paris.)

Erin explained on stage at a high-level what this appliance does, but below are some more specific technical details which may help in case you haven’t yet tried it out.

The appliance can be booted on any physical or virtual 64-bit x86 machine … but before we start! – if you would like try running the appliance in a VM using either KVM or VirtualBox, then there is an even easier alternative which uses Vagrant to reduce the whole setup to a one-line command. If you like the sound of that, stop reading and go here instead. However if you want to try it on bare metal or with a different hypervisor such as VMware or HyperV, read on!

Continue reading 'How to build an OpenStack cloud from SUSEcon’s free USB stick handouts'»

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By Adam, November 1, 2014 7:39 pm

6 months after its debut in Atlanta, the HA workshop happening again in Paris, this Monday (16:20, Room 241)! If you plan on attending and didn’t already see Florian’s blog post, please get downloading and installing the prerequisite files quick, because downloading them over hotel or conference wifi is likely to be painful. (N.B. Unless you have a really strong reason not to, please go with the VirtualBox option, because there are more pitfalls when using KVM+libvirt.)

However if you’re already on the way to Paris, don’t despair, because we’ll also do our best to make the files available at the SUSE booth. And failing that, you can still just turn up, enjoy the show, and then try the hands-on exercise any time later at your own leisure!

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s some brief history:

Back before the last OpenStack summit in Atlanta in May, I managed to persuade Florian Haas to join me in an endeavour which some might view as slightly insane: run a 90 minute hands-on workshop in which we’d have every attendee build a Highly Available OpenStack cloud on their laptop, from scratch.

With so many moving parts and a vast range of different hardware involved, it certainly wasn’t plain sailing, but by the power of Vagrant and VirtualBox, I think overall it was a success.

Since then, we’ve been working extremely hard to improve the workshop materials based on lessons learnt last time. So what’s new? Well, firstly the workshop environment has been upgraded from Havana Icehouse (SUSE Cloud 4 vs. version 3 in May), and quite a lot of polish has been applied, since in May the HA code was still relatively new.

Secondly, we’ve added support for building the cloud using KVM+libvirt (although VirtualBox is still recommended for a smoother ride).

Thirdly, the documentation is way more comprehensive, and should help you avoid many common pitfalls.

Hope to see you at the workshop, and please come and say hello to us at the SUSE booth!