Crunchtools Lab Environment

Background

As a Solutions Architect for Red Hat, I have access to a very nice internal lab. This lab is great for giving demo’s but it is not set-up for personal use. As such, almost all of the Solutions Architects set up their own lab environments. Since, I recently came from working at a data center, my lab is set up almost identical to a real data center. As part of sharing with the community, I will document it here.

 

Layer 1

At layer one, the physical layer, my lab is composed of four different physical locations.

• DC1 – This location is composed of one physical machine, a DL320 G5 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with many KVM virtual machines running on it
• DC2 – This location is composed of one physical machine, Lenovo T510 laptop running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with many KVM virtual machines running on it
• DC3 – This location is composed of one XEN based virtual machine, a Linode running CentOS 6.
• DC4 – This location is composed of several physical machines, the router is a Fujitsu Primenergy TX100 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with many KVM virtual machines running on it. This machine also routes traffic for 4 Gateway Core i5 servers which also host virtual machines.

 

Layer 2

There are currently several virtual bridges at each site:

• virbr0 – Traffic inbound/outbound to the Internet (NAT). Hosts DNSMASQ, built into KVM networking.
• virbr1 – Traffic inbound/outbound to and from other Crunchtools data centers (Bridged). Hosts DHCPD, which also allows PXE boot to occur.
• virbr2 – Private traffic for clustering and such
• virbr3 – Private traffic for clustering and such
• virbr# – Future virtual bridges

 

Layer 3

Layer three is composed of several networks with routing rules distributed by OpenVPN and statically added on virtual machines

• 192.168.100.0/24 (virbr0) – KVM Network which supports access to internet for some sites.
• 192.168.124.0/24 (virbr1) – DC1: EYEMG Data Center, sven.crunchtools.com.
• 192.168.126.0/24 (virbr1) – DC2: Linode DFW Data Center, lance.crunchtools.com.
• 192.168.122.0/24 (virbr1) – DC3: Mobile: Uses RHEL/KVM default of 192.168.122.0, keith.crunchtools.com.
• 192.168.128.0/24 (virbr1) – DC4: Crosby Data Center, kirk.crunchtools.com.
• 192.168.120.0/24 (tun0) – OpenVPN private network between all sites, no servers reside here. OpenVPN assigns IP addresses to clients.

 

Layer 4+

This post will not document layer 4 and above services. These services will be documented in a a future addendum.