• RunningNova

Running OpenStack Compute (Nova)

Using Nova as a cloud fabric controller, you are first going to need to setup user credentials. Using those, you'll be able to upload images that you want to run in the cloud, then start an instance and connect to it. Here are some basic commands to get Nova running once it's installed.

Configuration

There are many ways to configure Nova, but the basics include the nova.conf file, setting up the database, and integrating networking.

Setting up a volume group

You'll need to create a volume group for nova-volume if you see errors where the volume manager is looking for the nova-volumes lvm group. More detailed instructions for configuring Compute (nova) to use volumes is available on docs.openstack.org in the Compute Admin manual.

# This creates a 1GB file to create volumes out of
dd if=/dev/zero of=MY_FILE_PATH bs=100M count=10
losetup --show -f MY_FILE_PATH
# replace /dev/loop0 below with whatever losetup returns
# nova-volumes is the default for the --volume_group flag
vgcreate nova-volumes /dev/loop0

Setting up your user

If you have installed OpenStack Compute from the nova.sh script, the Nova administrator user was already created for you, and an image was already registered. You can skip directly to Starting an instance.

Create the network configuration

Type or copy/paste in the following line to create a network prior to creating a user or a project.

sudo nova-manage network create novanetwork 10.0.0.0/8 1 64

For this command, the IP address is the cidr notation for your netmask, such as 192.168.1.0/24. The value 1 is the total number of networks you want made, and the 64 value is the number of IP addresses in each network.

Note: This syntax applies to release D3, earlier releases omit the network name "novanetwork"

After running this command, entries are made in the ‘networks’ and ‘fixed_ips’ table in the database.

Create a Nova administrator

Type or copy/paste in the following line to create a user named "anne".

sudo nova-manage user admin anne

You see an access key and a secret key export, such as these made-up ones:

export EC2_ACCESS_KEY=4e6498a2-blah-blah-blah-17d1333t97fd
export EC2_SECRET_KEY=0a520304-blah-blah-blah-340sp34k05bbe9a7

Create a project for the user you created

Type or copy/paste in the following line to create a project named IRT (for Ice Road Truckers, of course) with the newly-created user named anne.

sudo nova-manage project create IRT anne

Download credentials for your user/project

Next, type or copy/paste in the following line to get your credentials as a zip file.

sudo nova-manage project zipfile IRT anne

2011-01-31 12:00:53,151 WARNING nova.auth.manager [-] No vpn data for project IRT

Note: If you see an "error loading the config file './openssl.cnf'" it means you can copy the openssl.cnf file to the location where Nova expects it and reboot, then try the command again. Alternatively, if you haven't done yet, generate the certificate information first:

cd /opt/nova-2011.1/CA
sudo ./genrootca.sh

Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
......................................................++++++
.............................................++++++
writing new private key to 'private/cakey.pem'
-----
Using configuration from ./openssl.cnf

Unzip and source credentials

You should have a nova.zip file in your current working directory. Unzip it with this command:

unzip nova.zip

You'll see these files extract:

Archive:  nova.zip
 extracting: novarc
 extracting: pk.pem
 extracting: cert.pem
 extracting: nova-vpn.conf
 extracting: cacert.pem

Then type or copy/paste the following to source the novarc file in your current working directory.

. novarc

If you open a new shell, you'll have to source the novarc file again so that the commands know which cloud credentials to use.

Register an image

Instances are created from registered images. Before you can spin your own instance, you will have to register an image.

Get an image

There are several sources for cloud-ready image tarballs:

You can use wget to download the selected image, for example:

wget http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/ubuntu-10.04-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz

Registering the image

If you are using Ubuntu, you can use uec-publish-tarball from the cloud-utils package to register the tarball in one step:

uec-publish-tarball ubuntu-10.04-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz mybucket

This will register your image in the "mybucket" bucket. The tool will output 3 references: emi, eri and eki. You need to use the emi value in the next section (I got “ami-g06qbntt″).

If you can't use uec-publish-tarball, untar the image and customize the first parameters in bundleUploadRegister.sh for your image or follow the manual registration process.

Starting an instance

Create a SSH keypair

Type or copy/paste the following commands to generate and register a SSH keypair for use in accessing the instances.

euca-add-keypair mykey > mykey.priv
chmod 600 mykey.priv

Start the instance

Type or copy/paste the following commands to run an instance using the keypair and IDs that we previously created.

euca-run-instances ami-g06qbntt -k mykey -t m1.tiny

You should see this in response:

RESERVATION     r-0at28z12      IRT
INSTANCE        i-1b0bh8n       ami-g06qbntt    10.0.0.3        10.0.0.3        scheduling      mykey (IRT, None)      m1.tiny 2010-10-18 19:02:10.443599

Wait for instance to be running

Type or copy/paste the following command repeatedly to watch as the scheduler launches, and completes booting your instance:

euca-describe-instances

While the instance is still launching, you should see this in response:

RESERVATION     r-0at28z12      IRT
INSTANCE        i-1b0bh8n       ami-g06qbntt    10.0.0.3        10.0.0.3        launching       mykey (IRT, cloud02)   m1.tiny 2010-10-18 19:02:10.443599

When the instance is running, you should see this in response:

RESERVATION     r-0at28z12      IRT
INSTANCE        i-1b0bh8n       ami-g06qbntt    10.0.0.3        10.0.0.3        running mykey (IRT, cloud02)    0      m1.tiny 2010-10-18 19:02:10.443599

Authorize SSH connections to the instance and connect

Type or copy/paste the following commands to ssh to the instance using your private key.

euca-authorize -P tcp -p 22 default
ssh -i mykey.priv root@10.0.0.3

Tear down instance when you're done with it

Type or copy/paste the following commands to tear down the instance when you're done with it.

euca-terminate-instances i-1b0bh8n