Tuesday 26 February 2013

Exalogic Virtual Tea Break Snippets - Wrapping the Exalogic iaas cli

Having worked with the Exalogic Command Line for a while I decided to wrap some of the common functions in a simplified bash script. This saves me creating the keys, connecting and identifying the appropriate Ids. Instead I can simply specify the Name and the script will do the rest of the work. This initial version has just a few commands in it but as I add more the blog entry will expand, as will the script, and document the new functionality.

Monday 25 February 2013

Exalogic Virtual Tea Break Snippets - Cloning an existing vServer

Following on from my Blog entry "Scripted Template Generation from an existing vServer" I have built a wrapper script that can be used to execute the Template Generation script or Clone a specific vServer. This script was not incorporated into the original script because it must be executed on a Compute Node with access to the /OVS/Repositories directory and the Compute Node are a minimal install and hence do not have all the required software available. As part of the Cloning process this new script will create an Assets input file that can be used with the CreateAssets.sh describe in the blog "Scripting Asset Creation" and optionally execute the result to create the clone.

Friday 22 February 2013

Exalogic Virtual Tea Break Snippets - Scripted Template Generation from an existing vServer

As part of your Exalogic Virtual environment you may want to build vServer that will be used, going forwards, as a template for future vServers. Currently the "Exalogic Elastic Cloud Administrator's Guide" has an appendix describing how this can be achieved using the OVMM interface. Based on internal A-Team work it is now possible to achieve this directly from a compute nodes command-line without accessing OVMM.

As a result of this I have built the script below that will take the files associated with a "Stopped" vServer and converts them to a template.

For this templating process to work the script will need to be executed on a machine with access to the /OVS/Repositories/* directories and this means running directly on one of the Compute Nodes (I generally run it on Compute Node 1).

Because of the space and resource limitations of the Compute Node (minimal OS) we will need to create a and mount a Share from the internal ZFS to save the working files and ultimately the Template. To this end the script will take a number of parameters that will specification of these directories. If these are not specified the script assumes we have the ZFS /export/common/images mounted on /u01/common/images.

As can been seen from the Usage section below the script only mandates the Name of the vServer to be copied but assumes that the user has stopped the vServer previously. Once the template has been created, or post copy, the vServer can be restarted.