Please Note: New FiFo 0.3 screencast released. Ver 0.2 is now depreciated.

Today we are going to look at a demo of the pre-release version 0.2.0 of Project-FIFO, the amazing Open Source SmartOS Cloud management software, that allows you to manage all your SmartOS nodes via an intuitive browser based GUI interface. It is simply amazing the work that the creator of this project Heinz N. Gies (aka “Licenser”) has managed to put into this project.

As usual your feedback is always welcomed and we would love to hear about any features you would like to see incorporated into the project. If you can help in any way e.g. code, document and gui contributions are always appreciated.

In the following screencast we are going to cover:

  • Project FIFO installation
  • Adding multiple SmartOS nodes to FIFO
  • Virtual Machine creation & destruction
  • User Management & permission control
  • In browser VNC connectivity  to KVM Virtual Machines
  • Detailed graphing and statistics with “Graphite”
  • In browser notification system
  • and more…

After a lot of time, effort and hard work, version 0.2.0 is nearing completion. To iron out the last few rough edges there is an interim 0.2.0pre version, which is a feature fixed version that will contain only bug-fixes prior to the 0.2.0 official release.

This version comes with many exciting new features and a solid base.

The biggest change perhaps is that node discovery has been entirely reworked in 0.2.0. It now uses mDNS to find new nodes that can automatically join the fifo cloud. This makes not only the configuration easier, but also increases stability. We also have the introduction of “backyard”, which is fifo’s cluster management library that takes care of handling net splits or node crashes therefore minimizing the impact of such events on the entire system.

In addition to the significant stability enhancements in 0.2.0, we have also reworked the wiggle UI to improve usability. Expect even better additions to the fifo UI in future versions.

Last but not least here are the new features:

  • Auto provisioning – When creating a VM, fifo can automatically pick the optimal destination host to provision on. This is done by a complex decision making algorithmic engine.
  • Visual System Statistics – You now have the ability to quickly look at your SmartOS hosts system health. This can be seen under the “System” tab in the wiggle UI which is very cool and an easy way to determine if a problem has been or is currently occurring.
  • Detailed statistics – fifo pushes lots of information into a statsd/graphite system to let you make nice and detailed dashboards of your running cloud!
  • Asynchronous notifications – the wiggle UI opens an asynchronous communication channel which delivers real time messages to the UI: e.g. create a new VM on one PC – it instantly shows on all browsers you’ve logged in with!

That’s about it, if you want to try it out grab the latest version with:

curl -sO http://release.project-fifo.net/0.2.0pre/fifofy.sh
chmod +x fifofy.sh
./fifofy.sh all hypervisor-ip zone-ip netmask gateway-ip nameserver-ip

This will set up your fifo vm running in a smart machine zone and in addition setup the “chunter” smf service in the global zone under FIFO Management.

For adding additional nodes simply ssh to your node and do the following:

curl -sO http://release.project-fifo.net/0.2.0pre/fifofy.sh
chmod +x fifofy.sh
./fifofy.sh chunter hypervisor-ip zone-ip

If you want to add additional nodes properly you also have to zlogin into the fifo smart machine zone and add the nodes hostname ip’s to the /fifo/hosts file.

e.g. /fifo/hosts

ip    mynode1.local
ip    mynode2.local
ip    mynode3.local

This is just an interim step that will not be required once the PXE Boot integration features have been incorporated in future versions of FIFO.

Enjoy!

⋅ SmartOS and friends ⋅ , , ⋅ 1 comment