We have already seen how to create virtual machines with KVM and Qemu, and how to manage them with tools such as virsh and virt-manager. This approach works when you need to work with a handful of machines and manage few hosts. To operate on a larger scale, you need a tool to manage host machines, VM configurations, images, network, and storage, and monitor the entire environment. OpenStack is an open source initiative to create and manage a large pool of virtual machines (or containers). It is a collection of various tools to deploy IaaS clouds. The official site defines OpenStack as an operating system to control a large pool of compute, network, and storage resources, all managed through a dashboard.
OpenStack was primarily developed and open-sourced by Rackspace, a leading cloud service provider. With its thirteenth release, Mitaka, OpenStack provides tons of tools to manage various components of your infrastructure. A few important components of OpenStack are as follows:
Nova: Compute controller
Neutron: OpenStack networking
Keystone: Identity service
Glance: OpenStack image service
Horizon: OpenStack dashboard
Cinder: Block storage service
Swift: Object store
Heat: Orchestration program
OpenStack in itself is quite a big deployment. You need to decide the required components, plan their deployment, and install and configure them to work in sync. The installation itself can be a good topic for a separate book. However, the OpenStack community has developed a set of scripts known as DevStack to support development with faster deployments. In this recipe, we will use the DevStack script to quickly install OpenStack and get an overview of its workings. The official OpenStack documentation provides detailed documents for the Ubuntu based installation and configuration of various components. If you are planning a serious production environment, you should read it thoroughly.
Getting ready
You will need a non-root account with sudo privileges. The default account named ubuntu should work.
The system should have at least two CPU cores with at least 4 GB of RAM and 60 GB of disk space. A static IP address is preferred. If possible, use the minimal installation of Ubuntu.
DevStack scripts are available on GitHub. Clone the repository or download and extract it to your installation server. Use the following command to clone:
$ git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack \
-b stable/mitaka --depth 1
$ cd devstack
You can choose to get the latest release by selecting the master branch. Just skip the -b stable/mitaka option from the previous command.
How to do it…
Once you obtain the DevStack source, it's as easy as executing an installation script. Before that, we will create a minimal configuration file for passwords and basic network configuration:
Copy the sample configuration to the root of the devstack directory:
$ cp samples/local.conf
Edit local.conf and update passwords:
ADMIN_PASSWORD=password
DATABASE_PASSWORD=password
RABBIT_PASSWORD=password
SERVICE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
Add basic network configuration as follows. Update IP address range as per your local network configuration and set FLAT_INTERFACE to your primary Ethernet interface:
FLOATING_RANGE=192.168.1.224/27
FIXED_RANGE=10.11.12.0/24
FIXED_NETWORK_SIZE=256
FLAT_INTERFACE=eth0
Save the changes to the configuration file.
Now, start the installation with the following command. As the Mitaka stable branch has not been tested with Ubuntu Xenial (16.04), we need to use the FORCE variable. If you are using the master branch of DevStack or an older version of Ubuntu, you can start the installation with the ./stack.sh command:
$ FORCE=yes ./stack.sh
The installation should take some time to complete, mostly depending on your network speed. Once the installation completes, the script should output the dashboard URL, keystone API endpoint, and the admin password:
Now, access the OpenStack dashboard and log in with the given username and password. The admin account will give you an admin interface. The login screen looks like this:
Once you log in, your admin interface should look something like this:
Now, from this screen, you can deploy new virtual instances, set up different cloud images, and configure instance flavors.
How it works…
We used DevStack, an unattended installation script, to install and configure basic OpenStack deployment. This will install OpenStack with the bare minimum components for deploying virtual machines with OpenStack. By default, DevStack installs the identity service, Nova network, compute service, and image service. The installation process creates two user accounts, namely admin and dummy. The admin account gives you administrative access to the OpenStack installation and the dummy account gives you the end user interface. The DevStack installation also adds a Cirros image to the image store. This is a basic lightweight Linux distribution and a good candidate to test OpenStack installation.
The default installation creates a basic flat network. You can also configure DevStack to enable Neutron support, by setting the required options in the configuration. Check out the DevStack documentation for more details.
There's more…
Ubuntu provides its own easy-to-use OpenStack installer. It provides options to install OpenStack, along with LXD support and OpenStack Autopilot, an enterprise offering by Canonical. You can choose to install on your local machine (all-in-one installation) or choose a Metal as a Service (MAAS) setup for a multinode deployment. The single-machine setup will install OpenStack on multiple LXC containers, deployed and managed through Juju. You will need at least 12 GB of main memory and an 8-CPU server. Use the following commands to get started with the Ubuntu OpenStack installer:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install conjure-up
$ conjure-up openstack
While DevStack installs a development-focused minimal installation of OpenStack, various other scripts support the automation of the OpenStack installation process. A notable project is OpenStack Ansible. This is an official OpenStack project and provides production-grade deployments. A quick GitHub search should give you a lot more options.
A step-by-step detailed guide to installing various OpenStack components on Ubuntu server: http://docs.openstack.org/mitaka/install-guide-ubuntu/
DevStack Neutron configuration: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/devstack/guides/neutron.html
OpenStack Ansible: https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible
A list of OpenStack resources: https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-openstack
Ubuntu MaaS: http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/maas
Ubuntu Juju: http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/juju
Read more about LXD and LXC in article 8, Working with Containers
