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What is Crowbar?

Crowbar was originally developed by the Dell CloudEdge Solutions Team as an OpenStack installer, but has since evolved to be an open-source general purpose tool. It is a platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal, providing server discovery, firmware upgrades, and operating system installation using PXE Boot. It can also deploy applications on top of functioning operating systems with Chef.

We are working to make this wiki complete, please help us out by updating the content!

News & Events

Crowbar is currently undergoing a refactoring effort on trunk. The stable branch is "Fred"

• Activity
  • In The News Page Added! Please help us maintain
  • Crowbar 2.0 Refactor - Community Collaboration info and Crowbar 2.0 background and design
  • Preparing minor updates to Fred (called Betty & Wilma)

Community Support

• Crowbar Mailing List
• Community Events and Meetings Calendar and ICS feed
• irc.freenode.net #crowbar (logs available here)
• Don't be shy to contact your Dell representative and ask about Crowbar!
• Trello boards for: current sprint and backlog

Downloads

• Rob Hirschfeld's Builds
• Torrents of Rob's Builds

Documentation

Overview

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

Basic Crowbar

• Dell Crowbar Deployment Guide (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, OpenStack Install)
• Dell Crowbar User's Guide (How to use Crowbar once it's installed)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop Deployment Guide - Fred, 2.0 (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, Cloudera Install)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop User's Guide - Fred, 2.0 (How to use the Crowbar Hadoop barclamps)
• Installing Crowbar (Just the very basics)
  • Installing and Running Crowbar in VirtualBox VMs
  • Installing and [Running Crowbar in VMware VMs] ( https://github.com/crowbar/crowbar/wiki/Running-Crowbar-in-VMWare-VMs )
• Videos (LOTS of great material here!)
• Getting-Started-(Newbie-Guide) (needs work)

Crowbar's Barclamps

• [Barclamp List] (https://github.com/crowbar/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

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!
• Automated Testing
• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Coding style guidelines
• Tips and Tricks
• Barclamp: create & install steps. (only works on Crowbar 1.1 builds!)
• Packaging Barclamps
• Upgrade Notes
• admin_deploy.sh Script to deploy ISOs on VirtualBox quickly.
• admin_setup.sh

License

See license and Licenses-for-Components for details.