Revision as of 23:30, 17 February 2013

Single node nova installation using Vagrant and Chef

Note: The original article was written by Anso Labs and can be found at http://ansolabs.com/articles/single-node-nova-installation-using-vagrant-and-chef.

Integration testing for distributed systems that have many dependencies can be a huge challenge. Ideally, you would have a cluster of machines that you could PXE boot to a base os install and run a complete install of the system. Unfortunately not everyone has a bunch of extra hardware sitting around. For those of us that are a bit on the frugal side, a whole lot of testing can be done with Virtual Machines. Read on for a simple guide to installing Nova with VirtualBox and Vagrant.

Install VirtualBox

VirtualBox is virtualization software by Oracle. It runs on Mac/Linux/Windows and can be controlled from the command line. Note that we will be using VirtualBox 4.0.

OSX

Download the latest at version at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Lucid

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lucid contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y virtualbox-4.0

Install Vagrant

Note that the below assumes (wrongly) that the user has RubyGems installed. There should be a section on installing RubyGems, and *not* from source tarballs from the Vagrant site... that's simply not professional to expect a user install a source package of a dependency in order to run your software. -JRP.

OS X

sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install vagrant

If this fails, install the MacPorts version of ruby instead. See http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/setup/mac.html for more details

Lucid

wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.6.zip
sudo apt-get install -y unzip ruby-dev libopenssl-ruby
unzip rubygems-1.3.6.zip
cd rubygems-1.3.6
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo gem1.8 install vagrant

Get the anso chef recipes

cd ~
git clone

Set up some directories

mkdir aptcache
mkdir chef
cd chef

Get the chef-solo Vagrantfile

Provisioning for vagrant can use chef-solo, chef-server, or puppet. We’re going to use chef-solo for the installation of nova.

curl -o Vagrantfile

Running nova

Installing and running nova is as simple as vagrant up

vagrant up

In 3-10 minutes, your vagrant instance should be running. NOTE: Some people report an error from vagrant complaining about MAC addresses the first time they vagrant up. Doing vagrant up again seems to resolve the problem.

vagrant ssh

Now you can run an instance and connect to it:

. /vagrant/novarc
euca-add-keypair test > test.pem
chmod 600 test.pem
euca-run-instances -t m1.tiny -k test ami-tty
# wait for boot (euca-describe-instances should report running)
ssh -i test.pem root@10.0.0.3

Yo, dawg, your VMs have VMs! That is, you are now running an instance inside of Nova, which itself is running inside a VirtualBox VM.

When the you are finished, you can destroy the entire system with vagrant destroy. You will also need to remove the .pem files and the novarc if you want to run the system again.

vagrant destroy

Using the dashboard

The openstack dashboard should be running on 192.168.86.100. You can login using username: admin, password: vagrant.