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Publication
UCC 2017
Conference paper
Automation of cloud node installation for testing and scalable provisioning
Abstract
Motivated by the lack of automated provisioning and testing tools for physical systems in modern cloud infrastructures, we developed a toolset to automate the installation of a commercial platform virtualization software: the IBM PowerVM NovaLink software. This toolset automates numerous manual installation steps and post-installation tests. The toolset uses Python programs to prepare the target system and to generate installation-configuration files through interaction with a web-interface of the POWER firmware. Expect scripts are used to drive the rest of the installation via interactions through a remote text console. With different scenarios of applying this automation toolset, we demonstrate its use in driving regression testing for the development of the NovaLink installer in a DevOps environment. Furthermore, we discuss its use in provisioning a large number of IBM POWER systems to be ready for cloud management software.