We're in booth 169 at IBM Interconnect 2016!

Stop by to say hi and to talk about how we can help your ITSM project be successful.

IBM Cloud Orchestrator Content Pack for Docker Containers

Here's a great video from IBM showing how to use the ICO Content Pack for Docker Containers:

ICO 2.5: Azure deployment

Here's a video I created going over some of the details of deploying through IBM Cloud Orchestrator 2.5 to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Using a certificate with an Azure deployment in ICO 2.5

The ICO 2.5 documentation clearly states that you cannot create a service that uses certificates from ICO, and that is still true. HOWEVER, you can deploy into an EXISTING service that has a certificate associated. The trick here is that you have to first manually create the service in Azure, then manually attach the certificate in Azure. Then when you select the "Deploy cloud service into Azure region" Self-Service option, select the "Use an existing Cloud Service" option.

ICO 2.5: Deploy LAMP stack additional requirements

Once you get ICO 2.5 up and running, you'll have a few self-service offerings available in the dashboard, including "Deploy LAMP stack". This offering requires just a couple of additional configuration steps in addition to the documentation to get it to completely work.

1. You MUST have a flavor named "m1.medium" in your project and it must be large enough for your image named "linux_img".

2. Your linux_img needs to have the yum repositories available that provide httpd, mysql and php. On CentOS and RHEL, these packages are on the base DVD. To provide these to the VMs on my private network, I have these DVDs mounted under a central (private) web server's web root, and have these URLs configured in the appropriate /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo files on my linux_img image.

3. The MySQL expects to have access to the file named:

/tmp/mysqlinstaller/world.sql

It runs this SQL script during install. You can download this file from

http://downloads.mysql.com/docs/world.sql.gz

I simply placed this file on my image so it's there for every VM created.

That's it.

A feature that I would love to see in OpenStack

A graphical user interface for the commands.

Yes, Horizon is pretty nice, but there are lots of things that it doesn't allow you to do. Additionally, the CLI commands are pretty intimidating. Here's the documentation for the current release: http://docs.openstack.org/cli-reference/content/openstackclient_commands.html . Notice how each command has at least 20 options, each with its own flags, etc. And Horizon doesn't actually call these commands. It uses the REST API (and/or other API), which is completely separate.

So what I'd like to see is something graphical that lets you first pick a command ('nova', 'glance', etc.), then you have a drop-down choice list for the next parameter, and the next, etc. Many of these commands require output from other commands as their input. So the idea would be that the interface is running each of the required commands to build the appropriate list of options. And after building the command, this tool could output that for you to use in scripts, etc.

If it was an easy task, it would already exist, and it doesn't. There's also quite a lot of movement in the code, so keeping this tool up-to-date would be quite a challenge. But I personally think it would be worth it.

ICO 2.5: Where does the heat template for the "Deploy LAMP stack" come from?

ICO 2.5 comes with a few samples in the Self-Service Catalog, including one named "Deploy LAMP stack" (under "Deploy customized cloud services"). Once you have your linux_img image configured correctly and your linux_key key pair created, you can request this offering to deploy a LAMP stack among three machines: Apache, MySQL and PHP. I found the heat template command logs on each machine in /var/log/cloud-init-output.log and /tmp/install.log, and wanted to find where exactly that template was coming from. It took me far too long to find it because it's an inline string in the JavaScript code that can be seen with Business Process Designer. Specifically, you can find it in the Embeddable Deploy Lamp Template service in the SCOrchestrator OpenStack Services toolkit, in the Build Parameters element on the diagram, here:

You can see it in the green text as part of the "Implementation" in the bottom panel.