Folks,
I'm following up on the action item from this week's VPP Weekly meeting
(http://ircbot.wl.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/fdio-vpp/2016/fdio-vpp.2016-12-13-16.01.html)
to start a discussion on maintaining, standardizing, and generating the
linux host images for VPP projects. As noted on the call, the different
VPP project run-time environments are in the process of diverging and in
some cases decaying to the point that the recipes for project
development documented on wiki.fd.io are non-functional.
The current permutations of Vagrant, VIRL, bare metal, container crossed
with OS/CPU variants for the execution environments required for
building and testing all of VPP projects has become unmanageable. This
is due to the lack of standardization and automation used to bootstrap
the original VPP Continuous Integration infrastructure during the FDIO
launch. The logical solution to this problem is to automate the
creation of linux host images, to standardize the contents of the base
image contents, then add additional OS packages as required meet
individual project needs. Packer is currently being used in both
CI-MANAGEMENT and CSIT for this purpose, therefore it makes sense to
standardize on packer as the image building tool to build a continuous
delivery system for linux host OS images across all fd.io projects.
The ci-management project is in the process of converting from vagrant
box images to building packer defined cloud vm (openstack) images for
fd.io worker VM's (Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, and Centos 7). This uses
an openstack builder on the linux foundation's cloud provider, base
distro images uploaded by LF into openstack, provisioner scripts to
customize the distro variants to produce an openstack image containing
the required fd.io packages.
[ @Vanessa, is there a write-up of the requirements being met for the
packer conversion? How/when are the base images created? What is the
process for upgrading these images to reduce the overhead of updating
the OS up to its current version over time (eg. baseimage == ubuntu
16.04.x instead of the original release)? How often are new OS images
going to be generated? ]
CSIT has utilized a set of disk image builder scripts + packer to build
the VIRL images used for CSIT functional tests. Unfortunately the
building/deployment of the VIRL images requires manual running of the
scripts and installation on the VIRL servers in the LF lab. There is
one critical difference in how CSIT utilizes packer to build the images
-- all package versions are saved into an image contents specification
file which allows the replication of the EXACT host OS configuration.
This is in contrast to continually downloading the latest package set
published by each distro. The intention was to fully automate the
generation/distribution/installation of the CSIT VIRL images (on a
periodic basis), but this has not come to fruition yet due to resource
constraints. I would advocate that this requirement (reproducibility of
the exact OS configuration) be incorporated for all fd.io projects and
that we synchronize periodic updates to OS contents across all fd.io
projects.
Someone on Tuesday's call mentioned that the puppet-fdio project was
contemplating using packer, however, I have been unable to find any
documentation on the wiki nor see anything in the repo related to
building images.
[ @Feng, is there any documentation on the scope/requirements for the
puppet-fdio project? ]
VPP & CSIT development environments as documented on both project's wiki
pages utilize the VPP vagrant infrastructure
(.../vpp/build-root/vagrant). This currently is still firing up ubuntu
14.04 utilizing a generic (i.e. non fd.io configuration) Vagrant box on
the Hashicorp Atlas server. The Vagrantfile also support a number of
virtual machine environments, some of which I expect have not been
utilized for enough time to be broken.
In the short term, VPP Vagrantfile needs to be upgraded to a ubuntu
16.04 box, VPP "make test" and CSIT functional test development
environment validated on all major host OS variants (Ubuntu 16.04/16.10,
Centos 7.2/3, Windows 10), and the VPP/CSIT how-to-develop wiki pages
validated/updated. IMHO, this is the highest priority issue and I am
currently working on the ubuntu variants on virtualbox.
The development of host OS images should be incorporated into a single
project -- puppet-fdio or ci-management being the most logical choices
IMO. I recommend that the requirements for project be specified on the
wiki. I'm willing to volunteer to create the 1st draft once the
appropriate project is determined. Additionally each project should
identify a resource to specify and verify the specific OS images in use
by the project team. I'll add a table to the requirements to track this
once we have the draft published on the wiki.
Subsequently, we will need resources to add/test image variants as
required (e.g. bare metal, containers, VIRL, etc.).
All comments and volunteers to help are welcome!
-daw-
_______________________________________________
vpp-dev mailing list
vpp-dev@lists.fd.io
https://lists.fd.io/mailman/listinfo/vpp-dev
