Ubuntu

Now that we have OpenStack installed and have set our desired operating system image, we are ready to launch our first instance in a self-hosted cloud.

Getting ready

You will need credentials to access the OpenStack dashboard.

Uploading your own image is not necessary; you can use the default Cirros image to launch the test instance.

Log in to the OpenStack dashboard and set the SSH key pair in the Access & Security tab available under the Projects menu. Here, you can generate a new key pair or import your existing public key.

In the previous recipe, we installed and configured OpenStack. Now, to start using the service, we need to upload virtual machine images. The OpenStack installation uploads a test image named Cirros. This is a small Linux distribution designed to be used as a test image in the cloud. We will upload prebuilt cloud images available from Ubuntu.

Getting ready

Make sure you have installed the OpenStack environment and you can access the OpenStack dashboard with valid credentials. It is not necessary to have an admin account to create and upload images.

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.

In the previous recipe, we saw how to start and manage virtual machines with KVM. This recipe covers the use of Virsh and virt-install to create and manage virtual machines. The libvirt Linux library exposes various APIs to manage hypervisors and virtual machines. Virsh is a command-line tool that provides an interface to libvirt APIs.

Ubuntu server gives you various options for your virtualization needs. You can choose from KVM, XEN, QEMU, VirtualBox, and various other proprietary and open source tools. KVM, or Kernel virtual machine, is the default hypervisor on Ubuntu. In this recipe, we will set up a virtual machine with the help of KVM. Ubuntu, being a popular cloud distribution provides prebuilt cloud images that can be used to start virtual machines in the cloud. We will use one of these prebuilt images to build our own local virtual machine.

Getting ready

Cloud computing has become the most important terminology in the computing sphere. It has reduced the effort and cost required to set up and operate the overall computing infrastructure. It has helped various businesses quickly start their business operations without wasting time planning their IT infrastructure, and has enabled really small teams to scale their businesses with on-demand computing power.

In this article, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating virtual machine with KVM
• Managing virtual machines with virsh
• Setting up your own cloud with OpenStack
• Adding a cloud image to OpenStack
• Launching a virtual instance with OpenStack
• Installing Juju a service orchestration framework
• Managing services with Juju

Network File System (NFS) is a distributed filesystem protocol that allows clients to access remote files and directories as if they are available on the local system. This allows client systems to leverage large centrally shared storage. Users can access the same data from any system across the network. A typical setup for NFS includes a server that runs the NFS daemon, nfsd, and lists (export) files and directories to be shared. A client system can mount these exported directories as their local file system.

In this recipe, we will look at the various tools available for troubleshooting Samba shares.

How to do it…

Samba troubleshooting can be separated in to three parts: network connectivity, Samba process issues, and Samba configuration issues. We will go through each of them step by step. As a first step for troubleshooting, let's start with network testing.

Checking network connectivity

Follow these steps to check network connectivity:

In this recipe, we will look at Samba configuration parameters in order to get optimum performance out of your Samba installation.

Getting ready

You will need root access or an account with sudo privileges.

It is assumed that you have installed the Samba server and it is properly working.

How to do it…

Open the Samba configuration file located at /etc/samba/smb.conf:

$ sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

Add or edit the following options under the global section of the configuration file: