Working with Knife and HP Cloud Services

We are excited to announce the availability of the new Opscode Knife plugin for HP Cloud Services. This plugin gives knife the ability to create, bootstrap and manage instances in HP Cloud Services Compute, currently in beta.

knife hp server list

This will give you a list of all servers in the currently configured HP Compute Cloud account.

$ knife hp server list
Instance ID    Name              Public IP         Private IP     Flavor     Image        Key Pair     State
65639          hp15-185-113-235  15.185.113.235    10.4.5.158     101        1236         hptesting    active
65640          hp15-185-113-240  15.185.113.240    10.4.22.15     101        1236         hptesting    active
65641          hp15-185-114-125  15.185.114.125    10.4.20.205    101        1236         hptesting    active
65642          hp15-185-114-56   15.185.114.56     10.4.8.26      101        1236         hptesting    active
65643          hp15-185-114-126  15.185.114.126    10.4.22.27     101        1236         hptesting    active
65644          hp15-185-114-149  15.185.114.149    10.4.21.6      101        1236         hptesting    active
65645          hp15-185-114-148  15.185.114.148    10.4.20.195    101        1236         hptesting    active
65646          hp15-185-114-127  15.185.114.127    10.4.21.238    101        1236         hptesting    active

knife hp flavor list

Outputs a list of all available flavors (available hardware configuration for a server) available to the currently configured HP Compute Cloud account. Each flavor has a unique combination of virtual cores, disk space and memory capacity.

$ knife hp flavor list
ID        Name              Cores     RAM          Disk
100       standard.xsmall   1         1024 MB      30 GB
101       standard.small    2         2048 MB      60 GB
102       standard.medium   2         4096 MB      120 GB
103       standard.large    4         8192 MB      240 GB
104       standard.xlarge   4         16384 MB     480 GB
105       standard.2xlarge  8         32768 MB     960 GB

knife hp image list

Outputs a list of all available images available to the currently configured HP Compute Cloud account.

$ knife hp image list
ID                Name
1234              CentOS 5.6 Server 64-bit
1358              CentOS 6.2 Server 64-bit
1361              Debian Squeeze 6.0.3 Server 64-bit
1236              Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Server 64-bit
1238              Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 Server 64-bit
1240              Ubuntu Natty 11.04 Server 64-bit
1242              Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 Server 64-bit

knife hp server create

Provisions a new server in the HP Compute Cloud and then perform a Chef bootstrap (using the SSH protocol). The goal of the bootstrap is to get Chef installed on the target system so it can run Chef Client with a Chef Server.

$ knife hp server create -f 101 -I 1236 -S hptesting -x ubuntu -i ~/.ssh/hptesting.pem -d omnibus -r 'role[base]' 2
Instance ID: 65646
Instance Name: hp15-185-114-127
Flavor: 101
Image: 1236
SSH Key Pair: hptesting</p>

<p>Waiting for server............................................
Public IP Address: 15.185.114.127
Private IP Address: 10.4.21.238</p>

<p>Waiting for sshd..done
Bootstrapping Chef on 15.185.114.127
15.185.114.127 --2012-03-09 18:18:17--  http://opscode.com/chef/install.sh
............</p>

<p>............
15.185.114.127 [Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:19:20 +0000] INFO: Chef Run complete in 25.468149268 seconds
15.185.114.127 [Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:19:20 +0000] INFO: Running report handlers
15.185.114.127 [Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:19:20 +0000] INFO: Report handlers complete</p>

<p>Instance ID: 65646
Instance Name: hp15-185-114-127
Flavor: 101
Image: 1236
SSH Key Pair: hptesting
Public IP Address: 15.185.114.127
Private IP Address: 10.4.21.238
Environment: _default
Run List: role[base]

knife hp server delete

Deletes an existing server in the currently configured HP Compute Cloud account.

$ knife hp server delete 65646 -y
Instance ID: 65646
Instance Name: hp15-185-114-127
Flavor: 101
Image: 1236
Public IP Address: 15.185.114.127
Private IP Address: 10.4.21.238</p>

<p>WARNING: Deleted server 65646

Configuration and Installation

In order to communicate with HP Compute Cloud’s API you will need to tell Knife the account ID, the secret key and tenant ID (you may also override the auth URI and availability zone). This plugin is still in active development, but it is fully functional today. Configuration and installation instructions are detailed further in the README on GitHub.

Going Forward

Looking ahead there will be further refinement to make ‘knife hp‘ a more polished experience. There is an ‘hp‘ Ohai plugin under development that will populate the ‘hp‘ and ‘cloud‘ attributes on nodes as well. Once HP Cloud Services leaves beta, it will already be well-supported by Chef.