"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 :

Tool / Software

Use

Comments

Cobbler

Provision baremetal hosts with hypervisor
Provision management server OS

Cobbler integrates well with Puppet and provides useful helper scripts

Puppet

Configure management server with mysql etc

 

DNSMASQ

DHCP + DNS

Used to provision hosts

Squid

HTTP Proxy

Testing infrastructure uses isolated network. Some tasks, like yum install, need internet access

NFS Server

As NFS secondary storage

 

ipmitool

Interact with baremetal machines through IPMI network

 

Marvin

Deployment and testing framework for CloudStack

 

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