[Gluster-devel] Providing VM images for beta testing? (was: Gluster Community Weekly Meeting)

[Niels de Vos]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 09:23:51AM -0500, James wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Niels de Vos <ndevos at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Niels - do you have any thoughts here?
> >
> > I was thinking of using virt-builder[1] which is already part of Fedora.
> 
> Vagrant was supposed to be:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet#Vagrant Maybe you
> know the official status?

The related tracker bug suggests that the work was not finished for F20:
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=998503, still ASSIGNED, 
  not ON_QA

> In the meantime, I've written an article on how to get it going. I've
> done the hard work of figuring it out, so it's pretty easy if you
> follow my steps:
> https://ttboj.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/vagrant-on-fedora-with-libvirt/

That definitely looks nice and easy. However I have my tools that 
install and clone VMs already, moving to Vagrant does not seem to bring 
me much, at least for now.

> > Personally I would stick with the Fedora tools, and not use yet
> > something else again. However, I'm more than happy if James builds and
> > publishes one or more VMs for the test days, of course he is free to use
> > whatever tools he likes :-)
> 
> Phew ;)
> 
> >
> > The images should be minimal, and I do not expect them to be bigger than
> > 512MB when compressed. Best would be to host them on the
> > download.gluster.org server, at the same location of the packages.
> >
> > Niels
> >
> > 1. http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html
> 
> I think we're mixing up tools here. What is the goal of this?
> 
> I'm a big fan of guestfish and RWM Jones's tools, but Virt-builder and
> Vagrant have different use cases.

Yes, I agree, I'm not really sure what potential testers would like to 
use...

> Virt-builder is good for building an OS from scratch, configuring it,
> and having it available to boot and use. You _can't_ easily iterate
> different test environments from a clean image without distributing
> that many different os images. Afaik, it only works with one machine
> at a time. The equivalent of this in "ruby land" is Veewee.
> 
> Vagrant on the other hand is great at iterating different test
> environments, with multiple machines running together. All you need to
> do is publish one base image, and a Vagrantfile, and you'll have the
> tools locally to bring up multiple different clusters and test each
> one. Want to start over from scratch, you can do so in 30 seconds. I'm
> not sure if there is an alternate tool that does this.
> 
> From my point of view, I'm going to be doing the Vagrant stuff
> anyways. I'll be publishing the code as usual, but I won't have
> anywhere to host images. If Gluster/RedHat wants to host this
> somewhere, others are welcome to use it.
> 
> Niles can also work on the virt-builder stuff if he likes, but the
> usefulness will depend on the intended use case.

The intended use-case is to provide testers with an easy way to start 
going. I assume that for a lot of people downloading+importing 
a VM-image is easier than creating+installing a VM from scratch. We 
currently offer only packages that users need to install on a system (VM 
or physical hardware) before they can start testing. The idea of 
providing VM images would hopefully attract more people to join the 
Gluster Test Fests. Which tool or VM environment we should provide would 
mainly depend on the wishes from the users.

Anyone with suggestions or preferences is more than welcome to let us 
know. How do testers want to (and can) setup some systems for beta 
testing? What would enable the biggest group of testers to do at least 
some testing of some functionality of their own interest?

Thanks,
Niels