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What is Crowbar?

Crowbar is a platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. It provides server discovery, firmware upgrades, and operating system installation using PXE Boot. It deploys applications on top of functioning operating systems using chef.

release notes & license

News

• 7/12 Roadmap: 1.4 has been released, with support for OpenStack Essex & Cloudera Apache Hadoop v4
• 7/6 Crowbar 2.0
• 6/27 Roadmap: 1.4 is Release Candidate
• 5/31 OpenStack-Essex-Deploy-Day was a Great Success!! On May 31st, more than 200 people from around the world gathered to learn about how to automate OpenStack deployments with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This day-long, world-wide event brought together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious. The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in four physical locations, where more than 70 enthusiasts gathered for the event: Kamesh's Blog has all the details.

Downloads

• Rob Hirschfeld's Builds

Documentation

Overview

• Roadmap (and Release-notes)
• Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

Basic Crowbar

• Dell Crowbar Deployment Guide - Fred, 1.3 (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, OpenStack Install)
• Dell Crowbar User's Guide (How to use Crowbar once it's installed)
• Installing Crowbar (Just the very basics)
• Installing and Running Crowbar in VirtualBox VMs
• Videos (LOTS of great material here!)
• Getting-Started-(Newbie-Guide) (needs work)

Crowbar's Barclamps

• [Barclamp List] (https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/Barclamp-List)

Crowbar and Openstack

• RackSpace Openstack Reference Architecture
• Crowbar-Openstack Networking Visio Diagram

Nova

• knife-openstack for Crowbar installs (manage your OpenStack Nova nodes with Chef's awesome tool: "knife"
• Nova Volume Tips - This is for OpenStack Essex in Crowbar (1.3 OpenStack/1.4 Crowbar)

Swift

• Swift deployment tips

Community Support

• Crowbar Mailing List
• To join our Skype Group, contact "DellCrowbar" with the word "barclamp" in the contact request.
• irc.freenode.net #crowbar (we're not there as much as we'd like)
• Don't be shy to contact your Dell representative and ask about Crowbar!

Development

• How to contribute
• Crowbar Tree/Branch Structure
• Automating workflow with the ./dev tool Great guide!
• Developing and Building Crowbar Good Stuff!
• Building Crowbar for Deployment Another Great Guide!
• Tips and Tricks
• Barclamp: create & install steps. (only works on Crowbar 1.1 builds!)
• Packaging Barclamps
• Upgrade Notes

License

The code and documentation is distributed under the Apache 2 license (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html). Contributions back to the source are encouraged.

See what's included: Licenses-for-Components

History

Crowbar was developed by the Dell CloudEdge Solutions Team (http://dell.com/openstack) as a OpenStack installer (http://OpenStack.org) but has evolved as a much broader function tool. It is a wrapper and orchestrator for Opscode Chef Server (http://opscode.com)

We are working to make this wiki complete, please feel free to update content.