You are here: Home / 2016 / Archives for March 2016

Setting up Ubuntu on VirtualBox for devstack

by

As discussed, devstack enables a software developer to run a standalone minimal OpenStack cloud on a virtual machine (VM). In this tutorial we are going to step through the installation of an Ubuntu VM using VirtualBox manually. This is a pre-requisite to installing devstack.

NOTE: There are several different ways in creating a base Ubuntu VM image. These steps are the more manual approach, however they are provided for completeness in understanding varying options.

Pre-requisites

  1. You will need a computer running a 64 bit operating system on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux or Solaris with at least 4GB of RAM and 10GB of available disk drive space.
  2. You will need to have a working VirtualBox on your computer. See Setting up VirtualBox to run virtual machines as a pre-requisite for these steps.
  3. You will need an Ubuntu server .iso image. Download the Ubuntu Server 14.04 (Trusty) server image (e.g. ubuntu-14.04.X-server-amd64.iso) to your computer. This will be the base operating system of your virtual machine that will run devstack.

If using Mac OS X or Linux you can obtain a recent .iso release with the command:

$ wget http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-14.04.4-server-amd64.iso
NOTE: devstack can be installed on different operating systems. As a first time user, Ubuntu 14.04 is used as this is a more common platform (and used by OpenStack infrastructure). Other operating systems include Ubuntu (14.10, 15.04, 15.01), Fedora (22, 23) and CentOS/RHEL 7.

Create an Ubuntu Virtual Machine

To create a virtual machine in VirtualBox select the New icon. This will prompt you for some initial configuration. Use these recommendations:

  • Name and operating System
    • Name: devstack
    • Type: Linux
    • Version: Ubuntu (64-bit)
  • Memory Size
    • If you have 8+GB use 4GB.
    • If you have only 4GB use 2.5GB. (Note. Testing during the creation of this guide found that 2048M was insufficient, and that a minimum of 2560M was needed)
  • Hard Disk
    • Use the default settings including 8.0GB, VDI type, dynamically allocated, File location and size.

By default your virtual machine is ready to install however by making the following network recommendation it will be easier to access your running virtual machine and devstack from your host computer.

  • Click Settings
  • Select Network
  • Enable Adapter 2 and attach to a Host-only Adapter and select vboxnet0
  • Ok

You are now ready to install the Operating System on the virtual machine with the following instructions.

  • Click Start
  • Open the Ubuntu .iso file you just downloaded.
  • You will be prompted for a number of options, select the default provided and use the following values when prompted.
  • Install Ubuntu Server
  • English (or your choice)
  • United States (or your location)
  • No for configure the keyboard
  • English (US) for keyboard (or your preference)
  • English (US) for keyboard layout (or your preference)
  • Select eth0 as your primary network interface
  • Select default ubuntu for hostname
  • Enter stack for full username/username
  • Enter Openstack for password (or your own preference)
  • Select No to encrypt home directory
  • Select Yes for time zone selected
  • Select Guided – use entire disk for partition method
  • Select highlighted partition
  • Select Yes to partition disks
  • Select Continue for package manager proxy
  • Select No automatic updates
  • Select OpenSSH Server in software to install
  • Select Yes to install GRUB boot loader
  • Select Continue when installation complete

The new virtual machine will now restart and you will be able to login with the username and password specified (i.e. stack and Openstack).

Post Installation

After successfully logging in run the following commands to complete the Ubuntu installation setup needed as pre-requisites to install devstack.

$ sudo su -
# Enter your stack user password
$ umask 266 & echo "stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" > /etc/sudoers.d/stack
$ apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
$ echo "auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp" >> /etc/network/interfaces
$ ifup eth1

You are now ready to download and install devstack.

You can also setup an Ubuntu virtual machine via vagrant which simplifies these instructions.

More information

This blog is a series for the software developer with no experience in OpenStack to experience just the tip of functionality and features to become more interested in the project.

VirtualBox networking for beginners

by

When using VirtualBox for my OpenStack development I always configure two network adapters for ease of development. The first is a NAT adapter that enables the guest VM connectivity to the Internet via the host. The second network adapter is a host-only Adapter that enables my host computer (aka my terminal windows) to SSH directly to the guest VM, or to access a web interface for example. This enables the use of tools like ssh, scp, rsync etc easily with multiple VMs without thinking of different ports.

Having the two adapters is very convenient, however when you install products such as devstack or RDO these require additional steps to manage the interface and configure the installation. These steps are relatively straightforward but they make the most simple instructions more complex.

There are alternatives to using the NAT only adapter and enable port forwarding. For example you can configure port forwarding of port 2222 to the guest 22 with (when VM is not running):

$ VBoxManage modifyvm "vm-name" --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,,2222,,22"
$ VBoxManage startvm "vm-name"

You can now connect to the guest VM via port forwarding on your host, in this case connecting to port 2222.

$ ssh user@localhost -p 2222

Personally I find this a disadvantage. You need to provide port forwarding for all ports you want to communicate on e.g. ssh (22), http (80) and keystone (5000). You need to do it in advance of using your VM, and you also need to do this for each VM.

However, depending on your needs and experience this is a valid alternative.

Ubuntu two adapter configuration

On Ubuntu, the following configuration file defines two DHCP network adapters.

$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

You can verify adapter information (e.g. IP address) using ifconfig.

$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:7f:a0:e2  
          inet addr:10.0.2.15  Bcast:10.0.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe7f:a0e2/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:585 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:455 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:129820 (129.8 KB)  TX bytes:64215 (64.2 KB)

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:66:8d:cb  
          inet addr:192.168.56.102  Bcast:192.168.56.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe66:8dcb/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:221 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:152 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:28289 (28.2 KB)  TX bytes:19443 (19.4 KB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:371 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:371 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:90509 (90.5 KB)  TX bytes:90509 (90.5 KB)

The ip command is also available.

To configure an IP with a fixed address on the host-only adapter network which is useful for many machines, you would use:

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.56.50
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.56.1

CentOS two adapter configuration

CentOS keeps a configuration file per interface. We start be determining the interface names.

$ ls -l /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 310 Mar 30 16:53 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s3
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 278 Mar 30 17:00 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s8
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 277 Mar 30 16:53 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s8e
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 254 Sep 16  2015 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-lo

And then can review the per interface configuration with:

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s3
TYPE="Ethernet"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
DEFROUTE="yes"
PEERDNS="yes"
PEERROUTES="yes"
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
IPV6INIT="yes"
IPV6_AUTOCONF="yes"
IPV6_DEFROUTE="yes"
IPV6_PEERDNS="yes"
IPV6_PEERROUTES="yes"
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
NAME="enp0s3"
UUID="2c0bdd66-badc-449c-8db8-b2c85a716dab"
DEVICE="enp0s3"
ONBOOT="yes"

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s8
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
PEERDNS=yes
PEERROUTES=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_PEERDNS=yes
IPV6_PEERROUTES=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
NAME=enp0s8
UUID=4127685d-a7b9-4b8d-a399-6dcacdb3396d
DEVICE=enp0s8
ONBOOT=yes

You can verify the network configuration using the ip command.

$ ip addr
1: lo:  mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp0s3:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:32:c0:4c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.0.2.15/24 brd 10.0.2.255 scope global dynamic enp0s3
       valid_lft 15876sec preferred_lft 15876sec
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe32:c04c/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: enp0s8:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:43:22:85 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.56.103/24 brd 192.168.56.255 scope global dynamic enp0s8
       valid_lft 1056sec preferred_lft 1056sec
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe43:2285/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

CentOS does not provide ifconfig by default, it’s included in the net-tools package (RDO for example installs this).

$ sudo yum install -y net-tools
$ ifconfig
enp0s3: flags=4163  mtu 1500
        inet 10.0.2.15  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 10.0.2.255
        inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe32:c04c  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20
        ether 08:00:27:32:c0:4c  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 437445  bytes 441847285 (421.3 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 142720  bytes 8897712 (8.4 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

enp0s8: flags=4163  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.56.103  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.56.255
        inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe43:2285  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20
        ether 08:00:27:43:22:85  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 14250  bytes 1708162 (1.6 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 15367  bytes 13061787 (12.4 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

lo: flags=73  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10
        loop  txqueuelen 0  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 5706360  bytes 778262566 (742.2 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 5706360  bytes 778262566 (742.2 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

References

Installing VirtualBox for OpenStack development

by

Download VirtualBox for your operating system

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization product that will allow you to create virtual machines on a computer using Linux, Mac OS X or Windows. While the current version is 5.x, older versions will also work if you are already using this software.

NOTE: There are different products that can provide virtualization on your computer. As a first time user with virtualization, VirtualBox is a common open source product used by developers.

Install VirtualBox on your system

Just follow the default prompts.

Recommended VirtualBox Networking

To provide for a better experience for installing and accessing devstack or RDO the following VirtualBox configuration setup is recommended to create a host-only adapter network on your host machine.

  • Start VirtualBox
  • Open Preferences (e.g. File|Preferences)
  • Select Network
  • Select Host-only Networks
  • Add Network (accept all defaults)

This additional step will create a network configuration in VirtualBox that is called vboxnet0. This will define a network in the 192.168.56.X range, and will configure a DHCP server that will issue IP addresses starting at 192.168.56.101. This will enable you to more easily access your VMs from your host computer as discussed in VirtualBox networking for beginners. ‎

Installing Openstack with devstack, a first-time guide

by

This guide will enable the reader to install a minimal OpenStack cloud using devstack for the first time.

This guide will assume you have never installed virtualization software, used or configured devstack or even observed a running OpenStack cloud. This guide does assume that you can perform some basic software development instructions as documented.

This guide is targeted towards the software developer that may want to review the Python code and contribute to the open source project or the system architect that wants to evaluate some of the features of OpenStack. If you are an end user should try a public cloud that runs OpenStack such as OVH, Rackspace or other public cloud providers listed in the OpenStack Marketplace).

There are some hardware requirements and various copy/paste command line instructions on a Linux virtual machine. While it would be possible to publish a completed virtual machine you could download and click to run, understanding the underpinnings of the most basic installation and configuration of devstack will provide an appreciation of the complexity of the product and the software development capabilities.

At the end of this process you will have a running OpenStack cloud on your computer that is running on a Linux virtual machine. You will be able to access this with your browser and be able to perform basic cloud infrastructure tasks, such as creating a compute instance. This guide is not intended to talk about the benefits or usages of a cloud.

You will need a computer running Mac OS X, Windows, Linux (see supported list) or Solaris with at least 4GB of RAM and 10GB of available disk drive space in order to complete the following steps.

  1. Installing VirtualBox
  2. Setting up an Ubuntu virtual machine using VirtualBox
  3. ‎Downloading and installing devstack
  4. Using your OpenStack devstack cloud
NOTE: These steps will provide one means of installing devstack with one type of virtualization software on a specific Linux operating system. This is only meant as a first-time users guide, and some pre-defined decisions have been made. There are multiple ways to implement and use devstack with different software and operating systems.

What’s next?

Without knowing the purpose of following this first-time guide what’s next depends on your. As a software developer you may be interested in looking OpenStack Bugs or contributing to new features of one of the many projects. As an architect you may want to understand a more complex configuration setup as you plan to determine what may be necessary to utilize a cloud infrastructure in your organization. This guide is only intended as the first introduction and hopefully has provided the intended result for the reader to consider what OpenStack can possibly provide.

More references

We will assume you have never installed virtualization software on your computer and have not installed devstack, or even seen an OpenStack interface. The devstack documentation does not make this assumption and so these more generic instructions are useful to the uninitiated. While some (including this author) feel these are instructions worthy of the official devstack documentation, others (with valid reasons) do not and hence the democracy of a large distributed open source project. For more information see review #290854. This guide joins the many others searchable by Internet search engines.

devstack, your personal OpenStack Cloud

by

As a software developer or system architect that is interested in looking at the workings of OpenStack, devstack is one of several different ways to start a personal cloud using the current OpenStack code base.

In it’s most basic form, you can run devstack in a virtual machine and be able to manage your personal cloud via the Horizon web interface (known as the Dashboard), or via several CLI APIs such as the OpenStack client (OSC). You can use this to launch compute services, manage boot images and disk volumes, define networking and configure administrative users, projects and roles.

The benefit of devstack is for the developer and deployer. You can actually see the running cloud software, interact and engage with individual services. devstack is a valuable tool to debug and bugfix services. devstack is used by the OpenStack CI/CD system for testing so it is robust enough to evaluate the core projects and many of the available projects that can be configured to be installed with devstack. You can also configure to use trunk (i.e. master) code, or specific branches or tags for individual services. The CI system for example will install the trunk of services, and the specific branch of a new feature or bug fix for one given project in order to perform user and functional testing.

devstack also enables more complex configuration setups. You can setup devstack with LXC containers, you can run a multi-node setup, you can run with Neutron networking. While devstack installs a small subset of projects including keystone, nova, cinder, glance and horizon, you can use devstack to run other OpenStack projects such as Manila, Trove, Magnum, Sahara, Solum and Heat.

The benefit of devstack is for evaluation of capabilities. devstack is not a product to use to determine a path for production deployment of OpenStack. This process includes many more complex considerations of determining why you want to implement an infrastructure for demand for your organization, and considerations of the most basic technical needs such as uptime and SLA requirements, high availability, monitoring and alerting, security management and upgrade paths of your software.

If you are ready to see what OpenStack could provide and want to run a local cloud, you can start with installing Openstack with devstack, a first-time guide.

Additional References

What is OpenStack?

by

OpenStack is a cloud computing software product that is the leading open source platform for creating cloud infrastructure. Used by hundreds of companies to run public, private and hybrid clouds, OpenStack is the second most popular open source project after the Linux Kernel.

OpenStack is a product of many different projects (currently over 50), written primarily in Python and is in 2016 over 4 million lines of code.

OpenStack Distributions

There are numerous distributions of OpenStack from leading vendors such as Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Cisco, SUSE, Oracle and VMware to name a few. Each vendor provide a means of installing and managing an OpenStack cloud and integrates the cloud with a large number of hardware and software products and appliances. Regardless of your preferred host operating system or deployment methodology with ansible, puppet or chef, there is an project or provider to suit your situation.

Evaluating OpenStack

For the software developer or system architect there are several ways to evaluate the basic features of OpenStack. Free online services such as Mirantis Express and TryStack or production clouds at Rackspace and OVH offer you an infrastructure to handle compute, storage, networking and orchestration features and you can engage with your personal cloud via web and CLI interfaces.

If however you want to delve behind the UI and API’s to see OpenStack in operation there are simple VM based means using devstack, RDO or Ubuntu OpenStack that can operate a running OpenStack on single VM or multiple VMs. You can follow the OpenStack documentation installation guides which cover openSUSE 13.2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) to install OpenStack on a number of physical hardware devices (a minimal configuration is three servers).

These options will introduce you to what *may* be possible with OpenStack personally. This is however the very tip of a very large iceberg. Considering a cloud infrastructure for your organization is a much more complex set of decisions about the impact, usefulness and cost-effectiveness for your organisation.

References

Retiring an OpenStack project

by

As part of migrating Oslo Incubator code to graduated libraries I have come across several inactive OpenStack projects. (An inactivate project does not mean the project should be retired or removed). However in my case when consulting the mailing list, it was confirmed that the kite project met the criteria to proceed.

There are good procedures to Retiring a project in the Infra manual. In summary these steps are:

  • Inform the developer community via the mailing list of the intention to retire the project, confirming there are no unaware interested parties.
  • Submit an openstack-infra/project-config change to remove the zuul gate jobs that are run when reviews are submitted. This is needed as the subsequent review to remove code will fail if these checks are enabled..
  • Submit a project review that removes all code, and updates the README with a standard message “This project is no longer maintained. …” See Infra manual for full details. This change will have a Depends-On: for your project-config review. If this review is not yet merged, you should add a Needed-By: reference accordingly.
  • Following the approved review to remove the code from HEAD, a subsequent review to openstack-infra/project-config is needed to remove other infrastructure usage of the project and mark the project as read only.
  • Finally, a request to openstack/governance is made to propose removal of the repository from the governance.

As with good version control, the resulting code for the project is not actually removed.
As per the commit comment you simply git checkout HEAD^1 to access the project in question.