All-In-One: Dedicated Hardware

Things are about to get real! Using OpenStack in containers or VMs is nice for kicking the tires, but doesn't compare to the feeling you get with hardware.

Minimal Install

You need to have a system with a fresh install of Linux. You can download the Minimal CD for Ubuntu releases since DevStack will download & install all the additional dependencies. The netinstall ISO is available for Fedora and CentOS/RHEL. You may be tempted to use a desktop distro on a laptop, it will probably work but you may need to tell Network Manager to keep its fingers off the interface(s) that OpenStack uses for bridging.

Network Configuration

Determine the network configuration on the interface used to integrate your OpenStack cloud with your existing network. For example, if the IPs given out on your network by DHCP are 192.168.1.X - where X is between 100 and 200 you will be able to use IPs 201-254 for floating ips.

To make things easier later change your host to use a static IP instead of DHCP (i.e. 192.168.1.201).

Add your user

We need to add a user to install DevStack. (if you created a user during install you can skip this step and just give the user sudo priviledges below)

adduser stack

Since this user will be making many changes to your system, it will need to have sudo priviledges:

apt-get install sudo -y || yum install -y sudo
echo "stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

From here on you should use the user you created. Logout and login as that user.

Download DevStack

We'll grab the latest version of DevStack via https:

sudo apt-get install git -y || yum install -y git
git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
cd devstack

Run DevStack

Now to configure stack.sh. DevStack includes a sample in devstack/samples/local.conf. Create local.conf as shown below to do the following:

• Set FLOATING_RANGE to a range not used on the local network, i.e. 192.168.1.224/27. This configures IP addresses ending in 225-254 to be used as floating IPs.
• Set FIXED_RANGE and FIXED_NETWORK_SIZE to configure the internal address space used by the instances.
• Set FLAT_INTERFACE to the Ethernet interface that connects the host to your local network. This is the interface that should be configured with the static IP address mentioned above.
• Set the administrative password. This password is used for the admin and demo accounts set up as OpenStack users.
• Set the MySQL administrative password. The default here is a random hex string which is inconvenient if you need to look at the database directly for anything.
• Set the RabbitMQ password.
• Set the service password. This is used by the OpenStack services (Nova, Glance, etc) to authenticate with Keystone.

local.conf should look something like this:

[[local|localrc]]
FLOATING_RANGE=192.168.1.224/27
FIXED_RANGE=10.11.12.0/24
FIXED_NETWORK_SIZE=256
FLAT_INTERFACE=eth0
ADMIN_PASSWORD=supersecret
MYSQL_PASSWORD=iheartdatabases
RABBIT_PASSWORD=flopsymopsy
SERVICE_PASSWORD=iheartksl

Run DevStack:

./stack.sh

A seemingly endless stream of activity ensues. When complete you will see a summary of stack.sh's work, including the relevant URLs, accounts and passwords to poke at your shiny new OpenStack.

Using OpenStack

At this point you should be able to access the dashboard from other computers on the local network. In this example that would be http://192.168.1.201/ for the dashboard (aka Horizon). Launch VMs and if you give them floating IPs and security group access those VMs will be accessable from other machines on your network.

Some examples of using the OpenStack command-line clients nova and glance are in the shakedown scripts in devstack/exercises. exercise.sh will run all of those scripts and report on the results.