Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Quick Setup of OpenStack Icehouse Development Env on Ubuntu14

OpenStack - there are quite a lot of vendors (including large enterprises) gravitating around the OpenStack ecosystem. It is a good thing that there is ample competition, which means more options for customers and hopefully better business models driving the cloud enterprise market. I look forward to research more from a technical standpoint.

In my view, a good starting point to learn more about the different technical features in OpenStack, is to experiment with them on a  small scale local environment. My test bed is a Ubuntu 14.4 64-bit Linux system on a 8x Intel Xeon CPU machine, with 8G memory and two physical network interface cards. The goal is to basically setup an all-in-one configuration, where all the services, including compute services, are installed on the same node. A controller node is where most of the OpenStack services are configured, and will be installed on my Ubuntu system.

Here, I will discuss couple of quick OpenStack development environment setup options:
    a) Using stable Git Icehouse repository
                OR
    b) Using Vagrant Box

Option-A:  Deploy OpenStack IceHouse using Git repo

1. Create work directory for OpenStack project, say $ICE_STACK_DIR
 
    # mkdir /scratch/<user>/icehouse  

2. Clone stable/icehouse git repository

   - used Netbeans ide to clone the Git repository branch to workdir location; alternately, run the following command from $ICE_STACK_DIR
 
    # git clone -stable/icehouse https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
   
3. Modify Devstack configuration file to override default settings as needed

  - localrc is a user-maintained settings file used to configure DevStack. It is deprecated and has been replaced by local.conf. More details here

  Sample local.conf: 



4. Install DevStack as a non-root user

   # cd $ICE_STACK_DIR/devstack
   # ./stack.sh

  - Read more about the stack.sh script in the official documentation

 - The default services configured by DevStack are Identity (Keystone), Object Storage (Swift), Image Storage (Glance), Block Storage (Cinder), Compute (Nova), Network (Neutron), Dashboard (Horizon)

  - During install run, hit errors like below:
        cp: cannot create regular file '/etc/nova/policy.json': Permission denied
     
    the resolution was to basically edit the file work-dir/devstack/lib/nova and change to 'sudo cp' for the failing file-access occurrences; for e.g. the following changes were made

        sudo cp -p $NOVA_DIR/etc/nova/policy.json $NOVA_CONF_DIR

        # Get the sample configuration file in place
        sudo cp -p $NOVA_DIR/etc/nova/api-paste.ini $NOVA_CONF_DIR
        sudo chown $STACK_USER $NOVA_CONF_DIR

   - To give an estimate, deploying DevStack in  my environment took between 5-6 minutes (after prior multiple failed attempts)

5. Perform basic sanity tests

   - Run the test scripts
         # cd $ICE_STACK_DIR/devstack/tests
         # ./functions.sh
         # ./test_config.sh
   
   - Run the exercise scripts
        # cd $ICE_STACK_DIR/devstack/exercises
   
       # ./horizon.sh 
   
        -- expect to see something like the following message printed on the console if everything goes well with the deployment
        .............
        + set +o xtrace
        *********************************************************************
        SUCCESS: End DevStack Exercise: ./horizon.sh
        *********************************************************************

6. Launch OpenStack Horizon Dashboard

   - Go to URL http://my.eth1.ipv4.address
   - Logon as default user 'demo' or 'admin' and password $ADMIN_PASSWORD set in local.conf

   Here is a screenshot of the dashboard System Info panel



7. Try creating instances from the Dashboard

   - Refer OpenStack Admin Guide for more details on managing the resources and services using the Horizon dashboard    

8.  Stopping and Restarting DevStack

   - To stop all processes that were started by stack.sh
        # cd $ICE_STACK_DIR/devstack
        # ./unstack.sh
   
   - To restart DevStack
        # cd $ICE_STACK_DIR/devstack
        # ./rejoin-stack.sh

Option-B. Deploy DevStack Icehouse using Vagrant

I found this blog article 'OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook' by Kevin very helpful in setting up my local development environment virtual machines.

Installed the following:

1. VirtualBox 4.3.10
2. Vagrant 1.4.3
3. Vagrant Cachier plugin    
     
and then followed the instructions as-is, they just work as documented.

Hoping to share my experiments with OpenStack as I learn more ....

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