Technology articles

Upgrading TripleO can be a hard task. While there are instructions on how to do it manually, having a set of playbooks that automate this task can help. With this purpose, I've created the TripleO upgrade automation playbooks ( https://github.com/redhat-nfvpe/tripleo-upgrade-automation ). Those are a set of playbooks that allow to upgrade an existing TripleO deployment, specially focused on versions from 8 to 10, and integrated with local mirrors ( https://github.com/redhat-nfvpe/rhel-local-mirrors ) In case you want to know more, please visit the tripleo-upgrade-automation project on github, and you'll get instructions on how to properly use this repo to automate your upgrades.

Starting to apply since Queens This article is a continuation of http://teknoarticles.blogspot.com.es/2017/07/build-and-use-security-hardened-images.html How to build the security hardened image with volumes Starting since Queens, security hardened images can be built using volumes. This will have the advantage of more flexibility when resizing the different filesystems. The process of building the security hardened image is the same as in the previous blogpost. But there have been a change in how the partitions, volumes and filesystems are defined. Now there is a pre-defined partition of 20G, and then volumes are created under it. Volume sizes are created on percentages, not in absolute size,: /              -> 30% (over 6G) /tmp           -> 5% (over 1G) /var           -> 35% (over 7G) /var/log       -> 25% (over 5G) /var/log/audit -> 4% (over 0.8G) /home          - > 1% (over 0.2G) With that new layout based on volumes, you have

When working with OpenStack Ironic and Tripleo, and using the boot from ISCSI feature, you may need to add some kernel parameters into the deployment image for that to work. When using some specific hardware, you may need that the deployment image contains some specific kernel parameters on boot. For example, when trying to boot from ISCSI with IBFT nics, you need to add following kernel parameters: rd.iscsi.ibft=1 rd.iscsi.firmware=1   The TripleO image that is generated by default doesn't contain those parameters, because they are very specific depending on the hardware you need. It is not also possible right now to send this parameters through Ironic. The solution will be to customize the deployment image to add these kernel parameters. The overcloud-full.qcow2 image that comes by default with TripleO is a partition image. It means that the bootloader is not previously installed, but it is done through Ironic. So the way to add custom parameters, is modifying the /etc/def

Continued from http://teknoarticles.blogspot.com.es/2017/08/automating-local-mirrors-creation-in.html In the previous blogpost, I explained how to automate the RHEL mirror creation using https://github.com/redhat-nfvpe/rhel-local-mirrors . Now we are going to learn how to deploy and upgrade TripleO using those. Deploying TripleO Undercloud To use local mirrors in the undercloud, you simply need to get the generated osp<version>.repo that you generated with the rhel-local-mirrors playbook, and copy it to /etc/yum.repos.d/ , in the undercloud host: sudo curl http://<local_mirror_ip>/osp<version>_repo/osp<version>.repo \ -o /etc/yum.repos.d/osp.repo Then proceed with the standard instructions for deploy. Overcloud Each node from the overcloud (controllers, computes, etc...) needs to have a copy of the repository file from our server where we host the local mirrors. To achieve it, you can include an script that downloads the osp<version>.repo fi

Sometimes there is a need to consume RHEL mirrors locally, not using the Red Hat content delivery network. It may be needed to speed up some deployment, or due to network constraints. I create an ansible playbook, rhel-local-mirrors ( https://github.com/redhat-nfvpe/rhel-local-mirrors ), that can help with that. What does rhel-local-mirrors do? It is basically a tool that connects to the Red Hat CDN, and syncs the repositories locally, allowing to populate the desired mirrors, that can be accessed by other systems via HTTP. The playbook is performing several tasks, that can be run together or independently: register a system on the Red Hat Network prepare the system to host mirrors create the specified mirrors schedule automatic updates of the mirrors How to use it? It is an Ansible playbook, so start by installing it, in any prefered format. Then continue by cloning the playbook: git clone https://github.com/redhat-nfvpe/rhel-local-mirrors.git This playbook exp

Starting to apply since Pike Concept of security hardened images Normally the images used for overcloud deployment in TripleO are not security hardened. It means, the images lack all the extra security measures needed to accomplish with ANSSI requirements. These extra measures are needed to deploy TripleO in environments where security is an important feature. The following recommendations are given to accomplish with security guidelines: ensure that /tmp is mounted on a separate volume or partition, and that it is mounted with rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime flags ensure that /var, /var/log and /var/log/audit are mounted on separates volumes or partitions, and that are mounted with rw,relatime flags. ensure that /home is mounted on a separate partition or volume, and that it is mounted with rw,nodev,relatime flags. include extra kernel boot flag to enable auditing: add audit=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX setting disable kernel support for USB via bootloader configuration

This article is going to cover how to deploy TripleO Quickstart on baremetal. The undercloud will still be virtualized, but controller and compute will be deployed on baremetal. This post belongs to a serie. In order to get more knowledge about TOAD and tripleo-quickstart, please read http://teknoarticles.blogspot.com/2017/02/automated-osp-deployments-with-tripleo.html and http://teknoarticles.blogspot.com/2017/02/describing-cira-continuous-integration.html Requirements Hardware A baremetal server is needed to act as Jenkins slave + contain virtualized undercloud. A multi-core CPU, 16GB of RAM and 60GB of disk is the recommended setup. One server for each controller/compute that needs to be deployed. They need to have at least 8GB of RAM. Network IPMI access is needed for each controller/compute server  A provisioning network is required, the jenkins slave and the controller/compute nodes need to be on the same network, and the defined CIDR cannot be used for any other