In case you’re not familiar with Cloud Foundry, it’s an open source Platform as a Service 
project initiated at VMware. More specifically it provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.
The project began two years ago when VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz recruited Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky out of Google and set them to working on Cloud Foundry. Collison and Lucovsky, who built and maintained Google’s API services, were brought into leverage their experience of working with hugely scaled out architectures.
The Cloud Foundry project has only been public for a matter of months and one question that I’m sure has popped into your mind is what if I want to pilot Cloud Foundry in my own environment, won’t installation and configuration be a total pain?
Enter the Crowbar
Crowbar is an open source software framework developed at Dell to speed up the installation 
and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal systems. By automating the process, Crowbar can reduce the time needed for installation from days to hours.
The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, “barclamps” sit on top of it to allow it work with a variety of projects. The first use for crowbar was for OpenStack and the barclamp for that has been donated to the community. Next came The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop and, just recently, Dreamhost announced that they currently working on a Ceph barclamp. And now…
Two great tastes that taste great together
Today’s big news is that VMware is working with Dell to release and maintain a Crowbar barclamp that, in conjunction with Crowbar, will install and configure Cloud Foundry. This capability, which will include multi-node configs over time, will allow organizations and service providers the ability to quickly and easily get pilots of Cloud Foundry up and running.
Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.
If you’d like to try out Crowbar for yourself, check out: https://github.com/DellCloudEdge
Press added after initial posting
- VMware Enlists Dell to Help Wage Cloud ‘Operating Systems War’ – Bloomberg, Bloomberg Businessweek
- Dell tunes Crowbar tool to Cloud Foundry – GigaOm
- Cloud Foundry PaaS to Get Automated Installation, Deployment Tools – Read Write Web
Extra-credit reading
- Collaboration between Dell Crowbar & VMware CloudFoundry – unleashes your inner cloud – Rob’s Blog
- THIS JUST IN: VMware and Dell Partner to Enable Cloud Foundry via #Crowbar – Joseph’s blog
- Introducing the Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop — Harnessing the power of big data
- DreamHost uses Dell’s Crowbar as a lever to raise automation.
- Dell announces availability of OpenStack solution; Open sources “Crowbar” software framework
- OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW
- VMware taps Google ethos with Cloud Foundry
- VMware Launches Open Source PaaS Cloud Foundry
Pau for now…
Barton's Blog 
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[…] Barton George, a marketing director within Dell’s public sector and large enterprise group, describes Crowbar thusly: “The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, […]
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[…] Barton George, a marketing director within Dell’s public sector and large enterprise group, describes Crowbar thusly: “The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, […]
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[…] Crowbar eases open source cloud installation […]
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[…] infrastructure. More recently we have been layering software such as Hadoop, OpenStack and crowbar on top of that infrastructure. This has not gone unnoticed by web pub […]
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[…] functionality. After we created the Hadoop barclamp, others picked up the charge and VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph […]
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[…] used by a variety of projects. Besides the OpenStack and Hadoop barclamps written by Dell, VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph […]
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[…] servers but is now used by Dell and other solution providers to deploy and maintain Hadoop™, Cloud Foundry, and other large scale multi-node products. A quick 4 minute introduction to Crowbar from the […]
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[…] servers but is now used by Dell and other solution providers to deploy and maintain Hadoop™, Cloud Foundry, and other large scale multi-node products. A quick 4 minute introduction to Crowbar from the […]
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