QA Infrastructure Design Proposal

"My company has a xyz feature for CloudStack. Can someone help me test it?"

This page is a proposal for creating a unified design for QA testing and automation. It should be looked at as a blueprint to follow for a QA set-up.

Any comments / suggestions will be much appreciated.

Goals

1. Enable community to run QA tests in automated way
2. Make it easy to replicate a set-up
3. Enable to run BVTs continuously

It is important to note that keeping it simple and easy to replicate is one of the main goals of this exercise. Thus, it may not cater to every possible use case.
The code is based on Prasanna's effort on similar lines (big thanks to Prasanna!)

Requirements

1. Every test run should be isolated from previous test run
2. Clean-up hypervisors between runs
3. Spawn up new management server for each run

Infrastructure

Every single set-up would contain

1. XenServer to host VM for Cobbler etc., and CloudStack management server
2. Isolated private network that is RFC1918 compliant. ( Recommend to use 172.16.0.0/16 subnet so it is easier to follow configuration)
3. Three baremetal hosts to serve as the "Cloud"
4. Dedicated IPMI network for baremetal provisioning

At the heart is a VM that serves as a Jenkins slave, and contains a set of tools to allow one to run QA tests on a clean environment. These tools, hosted on the VM (lets call it "Provisioner"), are :

The whole code is Python based making it easier to package as needed in future.