Nickapedia- abstract your problems away -

Nov
28thNow for something completely different : Ubuntu 11.10, KVM, & VLAN trunking

Sometimes the path to learn something means using very different tools along the way. In my case, I have been learning more on the developing virtual network world along with some of the new DevOps toolsets popping up. As part of this I have started using KVM as a hypervisor on an Ubuntu 11.10 platform in a portion of my home lab. I have learned quickly that getting something simple done in vSphere can be a bit of a chore in the KVM world. But on the flipside, KVM has been a fun learning experience in understanding virtualization in a more raw format. One of these challenges I have decided to share is a simple one. I was wanting to play with the Dell-created DevOps deployment tool: Crowbar. Crowbar is an wrapper for OpsCode Chef Server. While a pretty slick little utility to research in the cloud deployment and automation space; one glaring problem is it is designed to run on Dell PowerEdge servers. Since I don’t have PowerEdge servers lying around anymore I needed to run this in a virtual machine. This in itself isn’t a huge problem as a virtual machine can pretty much match most of the logical hardware pieces needed. But, the one problem I ran into was that Crowbar out of the box likes to have a couple interfaces with the ability to tag VLANs itself. In a bare-metal world connecting 802.1q trunk ports to a server is pretty common. And even in the VMware [...]