Wistar

Wistar is a tool to help create and share complex topologies of Virtual Machines and appliances.

screenshot

The most detailed, up to date, documentation can be found here: http://wistar.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Your (virtual) CPU must expose the virtualization hooks. You can check with a simple grep.

egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo

If nothing is returned, you may need to modify BIOS to enable virtualization. Users running wistar within a virtual machine can search the Internet for enabling the VT hooks. As a note, wistar will not work in Virtualbox as the software does not support exposing the hooks to the guest. Some IaaS providers do not expose the flags (e.g., AWS) while others (i.e., DigitalOcean) do.

Quick Start instructions for KVM deployments:

To get started, you need a server running Ubuntu 14.04 (or some similar flavor) with libvirt, kvm and a few python tools.

Install the required Ubuntu packages-

root@wistar-build:~# apt-get install python-pip python-dev build-essential qemu-kvm libz-dev libvirt-bin socat python-pexpect python-libvirt libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev unzip bridge-utils genisoimage python-netaddr libffi-dev libssl-dev python-markupsafe libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev git mtools dosfstools

Install Python packages-

root@wistar-build:~# pip install pyvbox junos-eznc pyYAML Django==1.9.9 cryptography websocket-client

Wistar uses Linux bridges to connect VMs to each other and to any external networks. To connect VMs to the external world, you'll need at least one NIC in a bridge. In this example, the first NIC is put in a bridge called 'br0'. To connect VMs to this NIC, add an 'External Bridge' object to the topology with the corresponding name 'br0'. Multiple external bridges are supported.

Here is an example /etc/network/interfaces. Modify as needed for your set-up.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    address 10.10.11.60
    netmask 255.255.240.0
    network 10.10.0.0
    broadcast 10.10.15.255
    gateway 10.10.10.1
    dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8
    bridge_ports eth0
    bridge_stp off
    bridge_fd 0
    bridge_maxwait 0

The easiest way to change the new configuration is to reboot as sudo service networking restart and sudo /etc/init.d/networking server are broken in Ubuntu 14.04 Server.

Create the images and instances directories.

root@wistar-build:~# mkdir -p /opt/wistar/user_images/instances
root@wistar-build:~# mkdir -p /opt/wistar/seeds
root@wistar-build:~# mkdir -p /opt/wistar/media

Clone the GitHub repo.

root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar# git clone https://github.com/juniper/wistar.git wistar-master

Create the SQL tables.

root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar# cd wistar-master/
root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar/wistar-master# ./manage.py migrate
--snip--
root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar/wistar-master#

For development you can use the built-in web server.

root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar# cd wistar-master/
root@wistar-build:/opt/wistar/wistar-master# ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

Alternatively, you can configure a more robust web server such as Apache or nginx.

Here is how you can configure apache for use with wistar.

root@wistar-build:~# apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi
root@wistar-build:~# cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/999-wistar.conf
Define wistar_path /opt/wistar/wistar-master
Listen 8080
<VirtualHost *:8080>
    WSGIScriptAlias / ${wistar_path}/wistar/wsgi.py
    WSGIDaemonProcess wistar python-path=${wistar_path}
    WSGIProcessGroup wistar
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wistar.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/wistar_access.log combined
    Alias /static/ ${wistar_path}/common/static/

    <Directory "${wistar_path}/common/static">
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
    <Directory ${wistar_path}>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Require all granted
        </Files>
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Grant the apache user permissions to the wistar directory and the apache/wistar log files:

root@wistar-build:~# chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/wistar
root@wistar-build:~# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/apache2/wistar.log
root@wistar-build:~# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/apache2/wistar_access.log

Also, ensure the apache user is in the libvirtd group.

root@wistar-build:~# cat /etc/group | grep libvirt
libvirtd:x:111:nembery,nova,www-data

If not, use the following command to add the user to the group.

root@wistar-build:~# usermod -a -G libvirtd www-data

Quick Start for VMWare based deployments:

A Packer based project to automatically build OVF images for VMWare can be found here: https://github.com/nembery/wistar_packer

Uploading Images and deploying your first topology:

To begin, browse to the 'Images' page and upload a qcow2 or vmdk based image.

Next, browse to Topologies to create and deploy a new network!

Send questions to nembery@juniper.net

Happy Hacking!

Contributions

Wistar was written by Nathan Embery (nembery@juniper.net) with contributions from:

Subrata Mazumdar
Justin Adrian
Jeff Loughridge
Wayne Chan
Robin Gilijamse
Matt Dinham

Getting help

Send questions to the Wistar Slack channel at:

https://wistar-vtm.slack.com/

To sign up for the Slack channel, visit our heroku app here: https://wistar.herokuapp.com/

Visit this page: https://wistar.herokuapp.com/ to generate an invite.

The most detailed, up to date, documentation should be available here: http://wistar.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Juniper / wistar