On the Friday before FOSDEM, we gathered at the IBM offices in Brussels for the CentOS Dojo.

This morning, Haikel Guemar led a hands-on RDO tutorial, in which he presented some basic information about RDO, and then provided instructions to install RDO, and several of us walked around ensuring that it was all going well.

Due to time, as well as VM limitations, we installed a subset of the entire OpenStack packages - just Nova, Glance, Keystone, Neutron, and Horizon. (Optionally, Swift.)

Also, rather than using the repo referenced in the RDO QuickStart, we used the newly available repo on the CentOS build system: http://buildlogs.centos.org/centos/7/cloud/openstack-rdo/centos-cloud-rdo.repo. This was done to demonstrate our ongoing move to packaging RDO via the CentOS Cloud SIG.

Following Haikel's presentation, Jakub Ruzicka talked about ways to participate in the RDO project. Jakub talked about the RDO Packaging Guide, and mentioned several places that people could get involved, including the effort to package OpenStack for CentOS 6.

We had perhaps 30 people in attendance, and it looked like at least a dozen people made it successfully through deploying RDO, which was encouraging; however, Haikel and I talked afterwards about what we might do to make events like this more successful in the future. If you were in attendance and have any suggestions, please send your comments to the rdo-list mailing list, so that we can help more people have a successful experience.

RDO: Follow the RDO community on Twitter at @RDOCommunity, and on Facebook and G+. Subscribe to the rdo-list mailing list for technical questions, or to the newsletter mailing list for monthly community updates.

CentOS: Follow CentOS on Twitter at @CentOS and learn more about the dojos by following @CentOSEvents. You can also keep up with the CentOS community on G+ and Facebook, and in IRC.

For the first time, FOSDEM will include a dedicated track for networking. The DevRoom covers two distinct topics: network management (the configuration of host-level networking, such as VPNS, and ethernet and wifi connections) and SDN (Software Defined Networking, the management of networking in large networks, including routing and switching traffic, and enforcing network policy).

Software Defined Networking

The DevRoom opens with presentations on Software Defined Networking, the ability to define network flow centrally for an entire network. Presentations cover three themes:

• SDN controllers, overlay networks: These projects can manage networking for clusters of hosts, potentially with many virtual machines running on them. An SDN controller can manage both physical and virtual infrastructure centrally, whereas an overlay network completely dissociates the virtual network topology from the physical network topology. Learn how to use OpenContrail as a network virtualization platform with OpenStack, or discover newer open source projects including Calico, MidoNet, and VXVDE. We will also have an overview of OpenLISP, an open source implementation of the Locator/ID Separation Protocol.

• Virtual switches: A virtual switch is a way to bridge network connections for multiple virtual machines on a host to the physical network. Thomas Graf will give us a guide to tracking stateful services with Open vSwitch.

• Packet filtering, dataplane processing: A key piece of virtual networking is the ability to move network packet processing functionality out of the kernel and into userspace, where it can be less of a bottleneck. There are a number of presentations on the high-performance packet filtering project pflua, and on the Dataplane Development Kit (DPDK).

Network Management

The second part of the day focuses on network configuration inside a host – automating the process of connecting to the network and managing network connections and network hardware.

• Hardware management: Learn more about OpenNMS, open source solutions for managing hardware switches, and using the netlink protocol with pyroute2.

• Network management projects: There will be status updates from NetworkManager and networkd.

• Network services: Learn about Knot DNS, a stand-alone DNS server.

For this first edition, we will have 16 half-hour talks, which allows attendees to get a brief overview of a lot of projects. All of the presentations will be recorded and will be online soon after the conference.

For more information about the projects presented, check out these links:

• OpenContrail
• Project Calico
• MidoNet
• VXVDE
• Open vSwitch
• pflua
• DPDK
• OpenNMS
• pyroute
• NetworkManager
• networkd
• Knot DNS

Many of us are finalizing our FOSDEM plans and preparing to head to Brussels, then we'll have a few days to recover before DevConf.cz starts in Brno. Planning ahead for DevConf.cz, here's a preview of some of the upstream project talks.

After Tim Burke's keynote, The Future of Red Hat, DevConf.cz attendees will have a schedule full of great technical talks to choose from, including:

CentOS

• Running a SIG in CentOS
• ABRT server - the resting place of crashed processes' soul (includes statistics about crashes in Fedora and CentOS)
• CentOS for Fedora
• Open Build Service, good, bad and ugly

Ceph

• Ceph FS development update

Fedora

• Fedora Atomic
• Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop
• Vagrant for your Fedora
• Using Fedora as a base for the IoT revolution
• Bootstrapping Fedora from zero
• Fedora: State of the Project
• Fedora Workstation Roadmap
• Automation in Fedora with Taskotron
• Google, ownCloud and your Fedora Workstation
• Bodhi2, MirrorManager2, progit, FAS3, anitya, the-new-coolness… What's going on in Fedora infra?
• Fedora Server - Getting back to our roots
• Fedora Release Engineering Today
• Life of a Fedora Cloud image
• Discuss Environment and Stacks in Fedora
• SCE wide system assessment for upgrading Fedora
• Fedora Council Joint Session

Gluster

• GlusterFS - Architecture & Roadmap
• Automatically deploying GlusterFS with Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant
• Efficient data maintenance in GlusterFS using Databases

OpenShift

• golang - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• OpenShift v3
• OpenShift v3: Docker, Kubernetes & the power of Cross Community Collaboration
• Hacking Docker through OpenShft

oVirt

• oVirt Overview - Open-Source Product For Virtualization Management
• Integrating oVirt and Foreman to Empower your Data-Center
• The new oVirt Extension API - Taking AAA (Authentication Authorization Accounting) to the next level

Project Atomic

• Performance Tuning of Docker and RHEL Atomic

RDO

• OpenStack Baremetal (Ironic) Status Update

Plus talks on Using Ansible for community-managed infrastructure, Software Collections, delivering open source projects using Agile & DevOps thinking, and more.

See the full DevConf.cz schedule at: http://www.devconf.cz/schedule.

For the first year and a half, RDO has been largely an effort run by Red Hatters, with some of the work going on behind the firewall. In our community meetup in Paris, at the OpenStack Summit, as I mentioned in my earlier post, we got a lot of feedback from people saying that they wanted greater insight into what we were doing, as well as the opportunity to play along.

So I wanted to quickly update with some of the things that we're doing in RDO to "swim upstream" a little more.

CentOS Cloud SIG

The CentOS Cloud SIG is moving along, although officially still in the "getting started" phase. We've started having weekly meetings on IRC, on the #centos-devel channel on Freenode. Those meetings are at 15:00 UTC every Thursday. (date -d "15:00 UTC" in your favorite shell will translate that to local time for you.) Have a look at the minutes from our most recent call and plan to attend the next one.

The Cloud SIG isn't just RDO, though. It also incorporates work in the Eucalyptus community, and other cloud provider projects have expressed interest, too.

RDO Packaging Meetings

In addition to the work that's happening in the CentOS Cloud SIG, there's also the RDO-specific work that happens outside of CentOS, and for that we have a bi-weekly meeting where you can find out what's happening, and where you can get involved. These happen on the #rdo channel on Freenode IRC, every other Wednesday, also at 15:00 UTC. You can see the minutes from the most recent meeting, and we hope to see you at the next one.

FOSDEM

And, on the same subject, if you plan to be at FOSDEM next week, RDO will be represented at the CentOS dojo. Haikel Guemar will be leading a demo of the RDO Quickstart, where you can see, and play along, as he deploys OpenStack on CentOS 7. If you're planning to attend, Haikel offers the following advice:

In order to run the tutorial on your machine, we recommend a VM on your laptop that has 20GB+ of disk space, 2GB of ram and atleast 1 dedicated cpu core. If your laptop has the ability to run nested-virt, please enable that and use it. It will make a large difference to performance of the overall setup. We would also like to request everyone to setup these VMs ahead of time, in either KVM or Xen or any other virtualisation technology you might use. A basic CentOS-7 minimal install is sufficient to start from.

Come swim with us

There are lots of places where you can get involved in OpenStack. We'd love to have you participate in what we're doing at RDO. Come along to one of the meetings, and see if there's something you can contribute to the effort. Although we're heavily Red Hat at the moment, we really want participation from the broader community of Fedora and CentOS users.

We hope to see you soon.

Follow the RDO community on Twitter at @RDOCommunity, and on Facebook and G+. Subscribe to the rdo-list mailing list for technical questions, or to the newsletter mailing list for monthly community updates.

Follow CentOS on Twitter at @CentOS and learn more about the dojos by following @CentOSEvents. You can also keep up with the CentOS community on G+ and Facebook, and in IRC.

RDO, the community-oriented OpenStack distribution for CentOS, Fedora, and their kin, is super-easy to get up and running, as a recently posted YouTube video illustrates:

At the end of the process, you'll have a single-node RDO installation on which you can create VM instances and conduct various experimentation. You can even associate your VMs with floating IP addresses, which connect these instances to the "Public" network that's auto-configured by the installer.

BUT, that's where things stop being super-easy, and start being super-confusing. The auto-configured Public network I just mentioned will only allow you to access your VMs from the single RDO machine hosting those VMs. RDO's installer knows nothing about your specific network environment, so coming up with a more useful single-node OpenStack installation takes some more configuration.

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The 2015 Ceph Day schedule is on its way. Rest assured, our radio silence on new events over the past few months has been down to planning for an even more packed 2015 itinerary. At the same time, we have been furiously updating the Ceph YouTube Channel with sessions from last year's events.

For the uninitiated, Ceph Days are the major upstream events for the Ceph community. With the project's core developers forced to come forward and tell us what they are up to, there is no better place to find out the latest on Ceph and the project's future direction. The events combine these updates with new ideas, advice and best practice examples from the project's leading global users, consultants, and hardware partners.

This year will see a slight revamp of the Ceph Day program to make sure the content is always fresh and interesting. Expect slightly more variation between the morning and afternoon sessions, with the morning offering more of the "overview", with high-level information, and the afternoon providing more of a deeper exploration of the technology aimed at developers.

Although nothing is set in stone for 2015, we have tentative plans to touch down in San Francisco, Shanghai, Munich, NYC, Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Melbourne. A few other cities have been suggested, but it will all come down to how many events we can fit in while still doing them well.

Meanwhile, if you can't wait while we finalize the details for this year's program, you can take a look at some of the highlights from 2014. The team has been hard at work updating the Ceph YouTube Channel with presentation videos from Ceph Day events at the end of last year in Paris, London, and Boston, as well as other presentations from around the globe. In addition to Ceph Days and talks in the wild, a new series of Ceph Tech Talks is launching that will be recorded and distributed on the YouTube channel for general consumption, so stay tuned for that.

Anyone keen to find out the latest on file storage and the status of CephFS, should definitely take a look at John Spray's London update on YouTube. The channel also has new material from the Developer Summits, as well as an aggregation of anything Ceph-related that we stumbled across at the end of last year.

If you have any Ceph-related video you would like added to the channel, please let us know about it.

Normally within the oVirt release cycle, we don't offer new features in mid-cycle. Instead, we just improve upon or fix up the features that are already in there, and new features will come out the next major point release. But last week we announced the oVirt 3.5.1 release candidate, and we're pleased to confirm that oVirt Engine will indeed run on el7 distributions, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 7.

As of this RC, oVirt packages for oVirt are now available for Fedora 20, el6, and el7.

There are two big reasons why this new functionality was added in mid-cycle. The first was straightforward: Users wanted it. A lot. As soon as 3.5 came out, there were many requests (online and face-to-face) that amounted to: When will Engine run on CentOS 7? That kind of community demand deserves a lot of attention.

The second reason was more strategic, and no less important. Recently, oVirt joined the CentOS Virtualization Special Interest Group (Virt SIG), and being a part of this SIG gets oVirt a lot of collaborative capability with the CentOS Project.

Initially being in the Virt SIG was attractive for the oVirt Project because we were looking for a way to ensure that the qemu-kvm package in CentOS would have live snapshot capability enabled. This flag is not usually set to enabled by default. But there are other benefits. Our oVirt Live ISO images use CentOS 6 packages as their base with Kickstart files from Scientific Linux. In the SIG, oVirt can make oVirt Live fully CentOS-based and eventually move to CentOS 7.

oVirt Node is a small, robust operating system image using minimal resources, while providing the capability to control virtual machines. Node is based on CentOS as well, and it makes a lot of sense to stay active in the Virt SIG.

oVirt is happy to participate in the Virt SIG with CentOS and other virtualization projects, and we're looking forward to gaining the benefits of closer collaboration in the broader virtualization community.

At the end of the month, more than 5,000 people from around the world will gather in Brussels for FOSDEM 2015 ( January 31 and February 1). The event is free and registration is not required, so if you're in the area (or can get there), FOSDEM is a great way to expand your international network and your skillset.

The schedule is now online, but check back before the event to confirm that talks and speakers haven't been shifted around at the last minute. Here is a sample of sessions you can attend to learn more about our projects:

• Arik Hadas will explain how to move virtual machines to oVirt, and he'll provide a preview of the upcoming integration with virt-v2v.
• Attend Federico Simoncelli's talk to find out about the ongoing effort to integrate oVirt virtualization and Gluster storage resources in single commodity boxes that can scale horizontally.
• Federico will also give a talk on Docker integration in oVirt and IaaS.
• Do you want to learn about smart virtual machine scheduling in an oVirt cluster? If so, check out Roy Golan's talk.
• Find out about utilizing NUMA architecture in oVirt by attending Doron Fediuck's session.
• Niels de Vos will provide an overview of GlusterFS and discuss future directions for the project.
• Do you want to learn about CentOS SIGs? Check out the CentOS Virt SIG talk by George Dunlap.
• John Mark Walker will explain how to control all of the things in his What You Can Do with Open Source Cloud Management (and ManageIQ) talk.

These are only a few of the many great sessions at FOSDEM 2015. Check out the event website to see what else is going on and who will be there at: https://fosdem.org/2015/

CentOS Dojo Brussels

The CentOS Dojo Brussels will be held January 30th, the day before FOSDEM kicks off. The dojo will have a sys admin and a cloud track, with the following sessions:

• CentOS Install Methods Review
• Guide to Software Collections
• Pulp Project, HowTo Manage RPM Repositories
• Tuning the Xen Hypervisor for Optimal Performance
• Optimising Xen Deployments for Storage Performance
• OpenStack Quickstart with RDO on CentOS
• Ceph Introduction and Use Cases
• GlusterFS Quickstart Tutorial

Seating is limited, so register online before it fills up.

If you can't make it to Brussels, maybe we'll see you at another upcoming event. Keep an eye on our event calendar for updates on where we'll be next.

Once again, we're pleased to be running Infrastructure.Next events in Ghent and alongside the Southern California Linux Expo. Tickets for Ghent and SCALE are available now on Eventbrite, don't miss out!

This is our second year running Infrastructure.Next. We had a great turnout last year, and are building on the previous events with feedback from last year's event. This year we'll have more case studies and deep dives, less introductory content.

Naturally, we're also going to spend some time talking about Linux containers, so you'll be able to get your Docker on and hear about how containers fit into the picture today – and where they'll be tomorrow. We'll be featuring talks on:

• Docker
• Project Atomic
• OpenStack
• Ansible

And, of course, we'll be discussing how you can use these tools together and get the most out of open source in your environment.

Schedule to Come

We're still putting the last touches on the schedule. But, as with last year, we've got a stellar line-up of speakers ranging from ones who are in the trenches on some of the most relevant open source projects, to folks working in today's data center. We'll have a focus on clouds, orchestration, and containers this year – so if Docker is on your radar, or if you're interested in setting up a private cloud, you won't want to miss this event.

Here's one:

"Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works." - Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, June 2001.

I pretty much remember that quote when it was made. I was contracting with LinuxPlanet, about nine months away from working full-time on Linux Today, when my fellow writers and I saw that one come over the wires. My thought at the time was a mental picture of a stick and a hornet's nest.

Another one:

"But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isn't successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software broadly accessible to consumers." Craig Mundie, Microsoft Senior Vice President, May 2001.

Mundie's remarks were part of an early trial balloon for Microsoft's concept of shared source, where just a little source code is opened to select customers and not really shared with anyone else. I've never met Mundie, but he was once a vocal detractor of Linux. At one point, it seemed like a week would not go by without another zinger from Mundie hitting the presses.

Recent events have left me feeling nostalgic and looking back over the years at my rather odd career path… particularly the years around the turn of the century, when everyone with a proprietary license on their software seemed to have a mad on for Linux.

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