openstack and resizing qcow-based instances

So – the trick with resizing a qcow based instances is this:

1. either you have to resize the partitions in the initramfs of the instance (which is not yet available as something we can easily do, but we’re working on it 🙂

2. you have to resize the partition on the live instance and then reboot the instance.

Since 1 is going to take more time/testing – I went ahead to make 2 as painless as possible.

using the cloud-utils and ansible I came up with this:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/openstack-qcow-disk-resize.yml

Put in the hosts you want to run it against. It installs cloud-utils, resizes the partitions using growpart, reboots, waits for the instance to come back alive, then does the fs resizing.

I timed it – it took a total of 1m2s and that includes installing cloud-utils, waiting at minimum 10s for the instance to reboot and then resizing the  actual fs.

The example I gave checks the values from growpart – so it  won’t run more than once (and it won’t run if you cannot resize). So you can run this play over and over and not reboot it all the time. I’m thinking I’ll probably include this as a tasklist for a quick instance provisioning playbook.

 

1 step forward 2 steps back? openstack and img creation issues

dealing with image creation in all clouds is completely full of suck. I’d more or less come to terms on it with euca but now I’m trying to do the same thing with openstack and encountering some super-duper happy fun times.

I have a rhel6 img which works and boots – it is qcow2 based so it handles kernel updates, etc properly, yay. However it handles resizing  the / filesystem exactly not at all.

If I make the rhel6 img an ami and upload kernel/ramdisk – it’ll resize (well dump it out) into a large filesystem – no problem – but it handles kernel updates not at all.

I would like to have both, I think I deserve to have both, i’ll be damned if any of my testing comes up with both. I’ve done a fair amount of googling and LOTS of things I’ve found say that the qcow2 or raw img should just work in either openstack essex or folsom but I am not having that experience.

Anyone have a suggestion?

hubris

Is thinking that because something is working well that it will continue to do so.

 

Silly me.

 

 

coprs and buildsystems and a question I was asked today.

Work continues on coprs but today someone asked me if I knew of a simpler buildsystem that would let them spin up a builder, stuff a bunch of packages at it, and return a pile of results.

I said well… ansible and mockremote could do it.

I started thinking about HOW that would work and realized I have all the pieces – but not a lot of motivation to put it together at the moment.

So I thought I’d tell folks how I would do it and maybe someone will:

 

1. write a playbook to spin up an instance in one of the public clouds using ansible and it’s ec2 module:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/ansible-euca-transient.yml

2. then provision the system with mock, a mockbuilder user and mockchain.

3. tell the user the ip the instance has

4. user submits jobs to it with:

mockremote.py -r chroot -b ip –destdir=/somewhere/ -c –recurse pkg1 pkg2 pkg3

5. user comes back whenever it feels like it

6. user runs a terminate playbook like:

http://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/infra/ansible/files/copr/provision/terminatepb.yml

which shuts down the instance they had spun up.

I can see wrapping that whole thing in a single script or just letting the user do it a bit at a time. Either way – trivial to setup your own personal, temporary and pristine builder.