Kwinble - Infrastracture as a code project based on ansible and kiwi

NEWS: Added support for opensuse Leap 15.3 and SLES 15 SP3!

This is a project born with the idea of installing VMs in an automated fashion for personal labs use at work on libvirt/KVM platforms, it's experimental and developed with a "learn by doing" attitude.

I am aware that there are excellent tools out there like terraform or pulumi for instance, which are probably more suited for daily enterprise usage, however, since I am familiar with ansible and kiwi I have decided to use these in order to keep the stack as simple as possible with a minimum amount of dependencies.

The project is constantly under development and subject to changes, the support for Azure is in the pipeline and under evaluation to be added in the future in a form of an Ansible role

Contributors are warmly welcomed :)

Overview

As mentioned, Kwinble is mainly composed by 2 tools:

• Kiwi-ng a powerful open source appliance builder capable of creating Linux images in a variety of formats such as Qcow2, raw, vmdk/vmx, just to name a few
• Ansible a popular open source configuration managemenet tool appreciated for its simplicity and its modular design which allows the intergation with tons of technologies from public cloud to baremetal and all in between.

The project consists of a 2 steps process:

1. the build of a GNU/Linux OS image from scratch using kiwi
2. the boot and the automated configuration of 1 or multiple instances using preconfigured Ansible roles

Once an image has been created can be reused for other Ansible executions, does not have to be built every time.

The idea is to give the user full flexibility and control from the build stage, where he/she can decide how the initial image should look like and what should contain, to the actual final running VM.

Kwinble is essentially a GNU/Linux factory inside the project folder.

Requirements

I am using openSUSE Leap 15.2 here so the steps shown are referring to this install, however, the same software can be retrieved and easily installed in a similar way using other GNU/Linux distributions.

Kiwi

kiwi version used for this project: 9.23.49

Kiwi installed by adding the kiwi repo to leap 15.2:

sudo zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/Appliances:/Builder/openSUSE_Leap_15.2/ kiwi-leap152

sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper in python3-kiwi

Ansible

A recent Ansible LTSS version:

ansible => 2.9.21 (preferable the one i use)

In my case the one provided by the leap 15.2 repo has been used

sudo zypper in ansible

Libvirt/KVM

on Leap 15.2 install KVM patterns:

sudo zypper install -t pattern kvm_server kvm_tools

Other required config

• Arp-scan is used for IP discovery and is going to be installed automatically if not present by Ansible during the first run.

• Make sure the local user is added to the libvirt group usermod -aG libvirt <username>

• Configure your local or global ansible.cfg to skip the ssh fingerprint host check:

host_key_checking = False

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/gnuninu/kwinble

cd kwinble

Prepare the image build with kiwi

The aim here is to build QCOW images with a small footprint so Ansible can take over, boot the image and finish the OS/App configuration according to the selected ansible roles defined in the main playbooks.

Kiwi is a very powerful tool, for full info visit kiwi website and read the detailed documentation, the following steps are only meant for a quick start and by no means as a replacement of the official documentation.

openSUSE Leap 15.3 build

NOTE: The KIWI templates used to build Leap are fetched from openSUSE JeOS project and then customised: https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:Leap:15.2:Images/kiwi-templates-JeOS/JeOS.kiwi?expand=1

cd jeos_template/opensuse-leap-153

Edit JeOS.kiwi and config.sh as needed if you want to modify the default settings

SLES 15 SP3 build

The package kiwi-templates-JeOS provides the templates for SLES and it's availbale in the sle-module-development-tools channel module

In order to build SUSE Enterprise Linux a subscription is necessary to access the online repositories through SCC and to be able to download a media ISO

Once a media is retrieved, it can be mounted locally, for example:

mkdir -p /mnt/sles-iso/sles153

sudo mount -o loop SLE-15-SP3-Full-x86_64-GM-Media1.iso /mnt/sles-iso/sles153

Enable the installation server (HTTP) keeping the default settings using yast:

yast instserver

Name: sles153

Directory: /srv/install

then create a symbolic link to the local installation server directory:

sudo ln -s /mnt/sles-iso/sles153 /srv/install/

Disable the firewall or make sure localhost:80 port is open

The resulting locally served directory can be configured in the repository section of kiwi in this way:

<repository type="rpm-md" alias="product-sles153" imageinclude="true"> <source path='http://127.0.0.1/sles153/Product-SLES'/> </repository>

cd jeos_template/sles153/

Edit JeOS.kiwi and config.sh as needed if you want to modify the default config

Build the image

openSUSE Leap 15.3

cd jeos_template/opensuse-leap-153

sudo kiwi-ng --profile=kvm-and-xen system build --description . --target-dir .

SLES 15 SP3

cd jeos_template/sles153/

sudo kiwi-ng --profile=kvm-and-xen system build --description . --target-dir .

Deploy the VMS with Ansible on Libvirt

Overview

The type of installations are controlled by a variable that needs to be passed to ansible.

The following types are available and mapped to the dictionaries predefined in the libvirt role here: roles/libvirt/defaults/main.yml

os_install var	Description
sles152multi	3 sles 15 SP2 instances
sles152	1 sles 15 SP2 instances
sles153multi	3 sles 15 SP3 instances
sles153	1 sles 15 SP3 instances
leap152multi	2 leap 15.2 instances
leap152	1 leap 15.2 instance
leap153multi	2 leap 15.3 instances
leap153	1 leap 15.3 instance

The number of instances can be added or removed by modifying the yaml file and/or reused as templates

IMPORTANT the images will be installed in the default storage pool which is configured by default to use the path /var/lib/libvirt/images and the NICS will be assigned to the default KVM network configured with NAT (192.168.122.0/24).

The libvirt templates are stored in roles/libvirt/templates/ and they can be customised as needed (for example if you want to add multiple NICs).

Deployment

NOTE: Before deploying SLES make sure the variable SCC_RC is populated with your Registation Code available from SUSE Customer Center, do so by editing the file variables.yml

Move into the kwinble root folder.

To deploy on libvirt/kvm we need to populate the os_install varibale using the --extra-vars option, in this case we choose leap153 (1 Instance):

ansible-playbook create_kvm_vms.yml --extra-vars "os_install=leap153" -K -k -u $USER

when prompted type the root password set previously by kiwi during the image build which by default is: linux, then your user sudo password

To remove the VMs installation run ansible using the same os_install variable but this time invoking remove_kvm_vms.yml playbook:

ansible-playbook remove_kvm_vms.yml --extra-vars "os_install=leap153" -K -u $USER

Local storage and static IP DHCP mappings will be deleted as well

Design diagram and notes about this project

To do list for future PRs

• users custom role
• Uyuni/SUMA role (multi disks)
• HA Clusters role (multi disks)
• Azure support
• other Linux distro support (Debian, CentOS/Almalinux...)

References:

• Kiwi documentation
• JeOS Project
• Ansible docs
• Ansible libvirt modules community project
• Libvirt docs