Build, Build, Build

Installing OpenStack

Strange as it sounds, the rest of the OpenStack installation, including Ceph, is very much a manual, but painless, operation from here on out. The setup shown in this example is the typical showcase for Canonical Autopilot – that is, the smallest possible standard setup according to current information. On the Landscape website, first press Setup . For Compute, select KVM , with Open vSwitch as the Network and Ceph for both Object Storage and Block Storage.

Clicking on Configure & Install takes you to a selection of nodes available for the new OpenStack setup. After selecting the three OpenStack servers, Autopilot placement (Figure 5) ensures that Autopilot optimally distributes the OpenStack services across the available nodes – and the installation starts. At the end of the process, Autopilot offers the option of creating an OpenStack user, who then has access to the OpenStack dashboard. Once this point is reached, congratulations are the order of the day: You have completed the journey to your first OpenStack installation.

Figure 5: In the last step of the deployment, you need to assign the nodes in the Autopilot cloud setup. Autopilot does everything else automatically.

Discover the Possibilities

At the end of the Autopilot setup, you have an OpenStack cloud, in which all the services discussed in the first article of this series [1] are available. The IP you use to call the dashboard at the end of the Autopilot installation is also the IP under which the Keystone authentication component is accessible. Horizon offers an Access & Security menu item with an openrc file you can integrate directly with the local environment by using the source command at the command line.

You can then use all the OpenStack command-line clients like the dashboard. If you just want to familiarize yourself with the dashboard instead, you can create virtual networks and start, stop, and remove VMs.

If you want to look at the setup on each host, the configuration files for the services are always located in a folder named after the respective service under /etc. If you have not had any dealings with Ceph so far, you can change this in the test setup: In addition to OpenStack, Autopilot has also rolled out a complete Ceph and configured it such that OpenStack accesses it and uses it for the Glance image service and the Cinder volume service.

Expanding the Setup

Within the constraints of the aforementioned limitation to 10 hosts, you can still extend the setup. If you enjoyed the solution after your first contact with OpenStack, you can first use MAAS to provision additional nodes and then assign them a task in the OpenStack setup using Autopilot.