Installing PuppetLabs Razor and DHCP - OpenStack

There are a number of provisioning systems, such as Cobbler, Kick-start, and Ubuntu’s own MAAS, to provide an operating system such as Ubuntu to bare-metal. In this instance, we are switching from Ubuntu’s Metal as a Service to the PuppetLabs Razor service to allow you more flexibility within your deployment. PuppetLabs Razor, like MAAS, provides a PXE boot environment for your OpenStack nodes.

Additionally, when a node PXE boots, it boots into the Razor MicroKernel environment which in turn runs PuppetLabs Factor and reports back lots of details about the physical node. From there, you can use the Razor CLI or Razor API to query inventory details about a machine or set of machines and provision an OS to them.

An additional feature is the “broker”, which allows for a hand-off to a DevOps framework. In this section, we will cover using the Razor cookbooks to install Razor onto the node.

How to Install PuppetLabs Razor and DHCP in Chef Server

To get started, we need to log into our Chef Server:

vagrant ssh chef

On the Chef Server, we need to configure a number of attributes for both the DHCP service as well as the Razor service before we can log into the Razor node and apply the configuration. To do this, execute the following commands:

sudo cat > ~/.chef/razor.json <<eof {="" "name":="" "razor.book",="" "chef_environment":="" "_default",="" "normal":="" "dhcp":="" "parameters":="" "next-server":="" "172.16.0.101="" ″="" },="" "networks":="" [="" "172-16-0-0_24"="" ],="" "networks_bag":="" "dhcp_networks"="" "razor":="" "bind_address":="" ,="" "images":="" "razor-mk":="" "type":="" "mk",="" "url":="" "https:="" downloads.puppetlabs.com="" razor="" iso="" dev="" rz_mk_dev-image.0.12.0.iso",="" "action":="" "add"="" "precise64="" :="" "http:="" mirror.anl.gov="" pub="" ubuntu-iso="" cds="" precise="" ubuntu-12.04.2-server-amd64.iso",="" "version":="" "12.04="" }="" "tags":="" []="" "run_list":="" "recipe[razor]",="" "recipe[dhcp::server]"="" ]="" eof="" knife="" node="" from="" file="" ~="" .chef="" razor.json="" 

Now that we have configured our environment, we can log into the Razor node and finish our installation:

PuppetLabs Razor and DHCP

In this particular section, there are a number of things happening. First, we logged into our Chef Server and created a node definition file that specifies how our Razor node should be configured. Specifically, in the “dhcp”: section we specified the “next-Server” as being the Razor node.

Additionally, configure the DHCP service to use the networking parameters we specified in the database earlier. In the “Razor” section, we tell the Razor service to bind to our private network address. Additionally, we tell it about what images to be used and where they can be downloaded from. The last thing we configured in the node definition file was the “run_list”, or recipes to apply to the node. In this case, we specified that we want to install Razor as well as the dhcp::Server components. Once we completed our configuration on the Chef Server, we switched over to the Razor node, copied in the Chef validation certificate. This allows the Chef Client to register with the Chef Server. Next, we put an entry into the /etc/hosts file to allow our Razor Server to identify where the Chef Server is. Next, we installed and configured the Chef Client using the same curl script we did when setting up the Chef Server. Finally, we executed the Chef Client which performed a number of actions such as registering with the Chef Server and executing the recipes in our run-list.