Oct 15 2012

Get 20% Off #OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook

Get an extra 20% off the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook from PacktPub.com during the OpenStack Design Summit using this code: OpenStackSummit2012.

Oct 9 2012

Easy OpenStack Folsom with VirtualBox and Vagrant

Testing OpenStack is now as easy thanks to VirtualBox and Vagrant. To run a mini test environment with Compute, Cinder, Keystone and Horizon you just need the following tools:

VirtualBox
Vagrant
Git client

Getting Ready

To set up a sandbox environment within VirtualBox to run OpenStack Folsom you will need to download:

VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/
Vagrant from http://vagrantup.com/
Git (using your trusty package manager or from http://github.com/)

Installation of these tools are simple – follow the on-screen prompts.

When ready we need to configure the VirtualBox “Host-Only” Networking. This networking mode allows us to communicate with our VirtualBox guest and our underlying host.
We will set up the following:

Host-Only Network: IP 172.16.0.254; Network 172.16.0.0/255.255.0.0; Disable DHCP
Host-Only Network #2: IP 10.0.0.254; Network 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0; Disable DHCP

(Hint: there is a bash script @ https://raw.github.com/uksysadmin/OpenStackInstaller/folsom/virtualbox/vbox-create-networks.sh to create these for you).

How To Do It

To create a VirtualBox VM, running Ubuntu 12.04 with OpenStack Folsom from Ubuntu’s Cloud Archive, carry out the following

1. Clone the GitHub OpenStackInstaller scripts

git clone https://github.com/uksysadmin/OpenStackInstaller.git

2. Make the scripts the ‘folsom’ branch

cd OpenStackInstaller
git checkout folsom

3. Run ‘vagrant’ to launch your OpenStack instance which will come up with IP 172.16.0.201

cd virtualbox
vagrant up

4. After a short while your instance will be ready. Note that on the first run, Vagrant will download a 384Mb Precise64 “box”. Subsequent launches will not require this step.

Launch a web browser at http://172.16.0.201/horizon and log in with:

Username: admin
Password: openstack

(Note, to edit the IP it is assigned, modify virtualbox/vagrant-openstack-bootstrap.sh (Warning its a bit of a sed hack!).

Sep 23 2012

What to expect from the OpenStack Folsom Release

We are nearing the most complete and feature-rich OpenStack release to date, so given that we’ve all be running stable Diablo and Essex releases, what’s in Folsom that will get people reaching for their favorite package manager?

The OpenStack Folsom release is the community’s sixth release. With each release, the community gets larger and more exciting as more companies come on board and more developers commit their code; with each release comes greater stability and new features that allow us greater flexibility when deploying our cloud environments.

It’s hard to talk about OpenStack Folsom without mentioning two notable new projects: Quantum and Cinder. Quantum provides a feature-rich and extensible API for programmatically defining networks. This allows for far richer network topologies to be defined than currently available such as configuring multi-tier applications and the subnets they’re allocated. It also allows for more advanced configurations at the backend by utilizing plugins, such as utilizing the excellent Open vSwitch software or implementing QoS and security functions. Quantum gives users of OpenStack the ability to completely control all aspects of their cloud compute environment, without compromising the underlying infrastructure and security of the underlying OpenStack environment; Quantum brings true multi-tenancy without any restrictions of VLANs.

Cinder is the OpenStack Block Storage project that was formerly known as nova-volume. This re-birth into its own project allows this crucial piece of core functionality to be developed independently of Nova (Compute) itself. To a user, this means faster development, quicker bug fixes and newer features to meet the demands of today’s hosting requirements.

Other notable features included in Folsom are Microsoft’s hypervisor, Hyper-V, making a comeback after it was removed due to the code being unmaintained for the Essex release and the highly available OpenStack Storage, Swift, being ramped up to 1.7.2. For those upgrading Swift, read the advice here https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg16188.html as this comes with a speed improvement to the rings that is backwards compatible – but downgrading at a later date using the new rings won’t be possible.

Put all the elements of Folsom together and you have a cloud software suite that allows you to easily scale out your secure compute environment and place highly available object storage within your datacenter. With a feature rich API fronting all aspects of an OpenStack controlled datacenter, management of this environment brings cost savings through efficiency and automation. Everything becomes code.

So how do you get the magical OpenStack Folsom installed onto the pristine that adorns your network? Over the last couple of months, there have been great strides in this area with the release of Rackspace’s Private Cloud Edition and Piston’s Airframe, both allowing swift installation of OpenStack without the overhead of some of the complexities previously experienced with an installation. Expect Folsom versions of easy to install methods soon. For those installing on Red Hat based and Ubuntu distros are left to stitch some of the required magic together, with some nuances to be mindful of when moving from a previous release – such as keystone and glance command line syntax changes. In fact, moving from a previous release isn’t as straight-forward as an apt-get upgrade, although with the Canonical starting to fulfil their promise of supporting future OpenStack releases on the latest LTS release via their Cloud Archive – this is quickly becoming a reality. Behind the scenes moving from one version to the next makes this process complex, so for those looking at moving from Diablo or Essex are best looking at migrating workloads to your new environment rather than expecting an hands-free upgrade at this stage. This “want” will become mandatory as OpenStack matures further to remove people from the endless conversations and confusions for those entering OpenStack and the sticking point being the version to accept as stable.

Essex laid the foundations for OpenStack production clouds, Folsom builds on this success and comes brandishing new weapons. With performance enhancements in Compute and Storage, Nova Volumes moving to its own Cinder project and Quantum added to its arsenal – OpenStack just made the choice easier when deciding on what cloud software you should deploy in your datacenter.

For more information on the Folsom release, take a look at Emilien Macchi’s deeper dive summary here: http://my1.fr/blog/whats-new-in-openstack-folsom/

Aug 21 2012

#OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook: Table Of Contents

I’m nearing the end of my latest project – my book: OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook. A few more cuts here and there and it will be released to the general public in September. This is predominantly the cause of the 4 month blog update starvation.

About the book

The book is designed specifically to help people get up to speed with OpenStack and give you the confidence and understanding to roll this out into your own datacenters. The book covers installation of OpenStack in a sandbox environment on local equipment running VirtualBox to recipes covering topics that allow you to move out to the datacenter, and sections covering some of the tools and techniques to make for a robust installation of OpenStack in your production environment.

The book will be out shortly and available from Packtpub, Amazon, Amazon UK, (and on Kindle), and Barnes & Noble.

The recipes

So a sneaky peak at the recipes to tease you until publish time:

Creating a sandbox environment with VirtualBox
Installing OpenStack Compute Packages
Configuring Database Services
Configuring OpenStack Compute
Stopping and starting OpenStack Compute services
Creating a cloudadmin account and project
Installation of command line tools
Checking OpenStack Compute services
Uploading a sample machine image
Launching your first cloud instance
Terminating your instance
Creating and modifying user accounts
Managing security groups
Creating and managing keypairs
Using Public Cloud Images
Alternative upload method using euca2ools
Creating Custom Windows Images
Creating Custom CentOS Images
Installing the OpenStack Identity Service
Creating tenants
Creating roles
Adding users
Defining service endpoints
Creating the service tenant and service users
Configuring OpenStack Image Service
Configuring OpenStack Compute
Using OpenStack Compute with the OpenStack Identity Service
Creating an OpenStack Storage Sandbox Environment
Installing OpenStack Storage
Configuring Storage
Configuring Replication
Configuring OpenStack Storage Service
Configuring OpenStack Storage Proxy Server
Configuring Account Server
Configuring Container Server
Configuring Object Server
Making the rings
Stopping and starting OpenStack Storage
Testing OpenStack Storage
Installing the swift client tool
Creating containers
Uploading objects
Uploading large objects
Listing containers and objects
Downloading objects
Deleting containers and objects
Using Swift ACLs
Preparing drives for OpenStack Storage
Managing OpenStack Storage cluster with swift-init
Checking cluster health
OpenStack Storage Benchmarking
Managing capacity
Removing nodes from a cluster
Replacing failed hard drives
Collecting usage statistics
Installing OpenStack Image Service
Configuring OpenStack Image Service with MySQL
Configuring OpenStack Image Service with OpenStack Storage
Configuring OpenStack Compute with OpenStack Image Service
Managing Images
Registering a Remotely Stored Image
Configuring Nova-Volume Services
Configure OpenStack Compute for Nova-Volume
Creating Volumes
Attaching volumes to instances
Detaching volumes from an instance
Deleting volumes
Installing the OpenStack Dashboard
Key Management using the OpenStack Dashboard
Security Group management using the OpenStack Dashboard
Launching instances using the OpenStack Dashboard
Terminating instances using the OpenStack Dashboard
Connecting to instances using the OpenStack Dashboard and VNC
Adding new tenants using the OpenStack Dashboard
User management using the OpenStack Dashboard
Configuring Flat Networking
Configuring Flat Networking with DHCP
Configuring VLAN Networking
Configuring Per-Project (Tenant) IP ranges
Automatically assigning fixed networks to tenants
Modifying a tenant’s fixed network
Manually associating floating IPs to instances
Manually removing floating IPs from instances
Automatically assigning floating IPs
Installing MAAS for bare-metal provisioning
Using MAAS for bare-metal provisioning
Installing and configuring Juju
Installing OpenStack Services using Juju
Increasing OpenStack Compute capacity
MySQL clustering using Galera
Configuring HA Proxy for MySQL Galera Load Balancing
Configuring highly-available OpenStack services
Bonding Network Interfaces for Redundancy
Monitoring Compute Services with Munin
Monitoring Instances using Munin and collectd
Monitoring Storage Service using StatsD/Graphite
Monitoring MySQL with Hyperic
Checking OpenStack Compute Services
Understanding logging
Troubleshooting OpenStack Compute services
Troubleshooting OpenStack Storage
Troubleshooting OpenStack Authentication
Submitting bugs
Asking help from the community

Where possible I explain both Euca2ools and Nova Client – so whichever floats your boat, the recipe will apply to you where applicable!

I’ll save all my thanks for those that have donated their time in helping me write this when the book is out. In the meantime – a big thank you to everyone in the OpenStack community that has helped me in some shape or form!

Apr 5 2012

April 5th 2012: OpenStack 2012.1 ‘Essex’ is here

THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX

http://openstack.org/projects/essex/

Apr 5 2012

New blog entry on openstack.org/blog: OpenStack Pulls It Out Of The Bag

You can read my newest blog entry on the trials and tribulations of my experience of OpenStack at http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/04/openstack-community-pulls-it-out-of-the-bag/

OpenStack is a true Open Source Cloud Platform, backed by many companies who have full-time staff writing code and fixing bugs. It has a large community of intelligent minds powering OpenStack that you won’t find in any other community cloud ecosystem. They’re the rock stars of cloud computing.

Mar 28 2012

Screencast / Video of an Install of OpenStack Essex on Ubuntu 12.04 under VirtualBox

A 12 minute screencast showing an installation of OpenStack ‘Essex’ on Ubuntu 12.04 running on VirtualBox

OpenStack Essex Installation Screencast

Note that this screencast has no sound.

Configure VirtualBox with the following
Network Interfaces:
eth0 (nat)
eth1 host-only: 172.16.0.0/16
eth2 host-only: 10.0.0.0/8
Memory: 1536Mb
Hard Disk: 20Gb
System Processor (optional but recommended): Increase CPU from 1
Install Ubuntu 12.04, specifying eth0 as your default interface
Configure networking:
eth1 is your public network set to be 172.16.0.0/16
eth2 is your private VLAN
Run an update on the machine, and reboot
Install Git which allows you to pull down a script to perform the installation of OpenStack
Grab the script using the following:
git clone https://github.com/uksysadmin/OpenStackInstaller.git
Ensure you’re running the ‘essex’ version of the script by running: git checkout essex
Run the script with the following:
./OSinstall.sh -F 172.16.1.0/24 -f 10.1.0.0/16 -s 512 -t demo -v qemu
Upload an image using the test supplied script:
./upload_ubuntu.sh -a admin -p openstack -t demo -C 172.16.0.1
Log into the Dashboard: http://172.16.0.1/ with ‘demo/openstack’
Create your access keys
Edit the default security group (add in SSH access and ability to ping)
Launch your instance
Log into your new instance!

Mar 6 2012

OpenStack Essex Keystone Changes – script showing use

The latest release of OpenStack Essex has changed the way Keystone is managed. Rather than most of the work being done by nova-manage, this has moved to a ‘keystone’ client command (which can be found in the Ubuntu package, python-keystoneclient).

An example of its use can be seen here: https://github.com/uksysadmin/OpenStackInstaller/blob/essex/keystone-services.sh