(I’m sure you all know that step one is “cut a hole in the box”.)
We’ve been continually working to improve the install process of Eucalyptus over the past few months. In particular, we’ve been working on a project that we call Silvereye. Our most recent goal: make it trivial to install a fully-running Eucalyptus cloud on a single machine.
A cloud on one machine? Why bother? Well, lots of reasons, actually. The biggest: the developer workstation. If you’re hacking on Eucalyptus, it’s pretty awesome to have Eucalyptus on a single system that you tear down and rebuild in 15 minutes.
Anyway: mission accomplished. Go to our Silvereye downloads directory and get the latest build (right now it’s silvereye_centos6_20121004.iso). Burn it to DVD, boot your target system, and choose the “Cloud-in-a-box” option from the Centos-based installer. Answer some simple questions. Boom, in 15 minutes you’ve got a cloud-in-a-box!
(Note #1: a helpful README can be found in the Github repo for Silvereye: github.com/eucalyptus/silvereye.)
(Note #2: in the cloud-in-a-box config, when you log in as root for the post-install config, it’ll say “hey, do you want to install the frontend now?” Answer yes. It automatically installs the node controller for you.)
(Note #3: Silvereye is not supported. At all. If you use it, there are ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEES that it won’t burn down your house, steal your pickup truck, or throw your mother into a wood-chipper.)
Silvereye is mostly the work of sysadmin-par-excellence Bill Teachenor, based on the original Faststart installer written by David Kavanagh — but various folks are now working on it; Andy Grimm, Graziano Obertelli, and Andrew Hamilton have all been pushing the cloud-in-a-box on various distros, and Scott Moser of Canonical did some great proof-of-concept work on the UEC code. So thanks to all of them, and everyone else who’s played with it.
Give it a spin; it really is dead-easy. We still need to round off a few corners before we can call it the official installer of record, but we’re quite close now.
Want that AWS-compatible cloud on your laptop? Of course you do. Now go get it.
Greg DeKoenigsberg Speaks 