As we described back in StackOps, StackOps provides a distro for OpenStack with a bare metal installer. The bare metal installer automates most of the installation and configuration tasks, leaving very little command line or configuration file editing for the administrator. It will install an operating system, necessary software packages, and Nova configuration files for us.

Since our purpose is to get some hands-on experience with Nova, we will be installing a single node that runs all the services. As StackOps is a full distribution, it makes many of the cloud design choices for us. The single node installation has made the following design choices:

If you have any problems following along with the installation, you can find more detailed documentation at the StackOps Documentation Site.

Install StackOps

Now that we have our CD or USB stick ready, we will go ahead and install it on our server. As we decided earlier, we will be installing a single node system (everything running on one server) with basic network and iSCSI volumes. StackOps makes most of these configuration decisions easy for us with their predefined deployment scenarios. All together, they offer four deployment scenarios:

• Single Node: All in one deployment.

• Dual Node: One cloud controller node (everything but nova-compute) and one compute node. This is the smallest viable production configuration.

• Multi-Node: A four node plus configuration with dedicated nova-network, nova-compute, and nova-volume nodes. This is a fairly advanced configuration that requires specialized networking.

• Advanced Multi-Node: An upcoming configuration that adds monitoring and other options to create a larger scale production installation.

We’ll use the “Single Node” scenario for this exercise.

Install Operating System

Your first step in installing your StackOps distro is the installation of the operation system, all the necessary prerequisite packages, OpenStack packages, and preconfigured nova components. In addition, it installs an agent that configures OpenStack for you. When you first boot your system with the CD or USB Stick, you’ll be greeted with the StackOps splash screen (as seen in Figure 7-1) that resembles most Linux distro installations.

Figure 7-1. StackOps Installation Screen

After choosing the “Install StackOps Controller Node,” you’ll be led through a number of standard Linux installation screens. They will ask you about your language and keyboard layout before installing a number of basic components.

After it has completed the basic components installation, it will ask you to configure your network settings. Enter your IP address, management network IP, netmask, and default gateway address. It will then try and contact a public NTP (Network Time Protocol) server. If it fails, it will ask you to specify one manually.

Note

StackOps requires that the nodes have static IP addresses, not DHCP provided ones.

Since I am putting this server on my home network, I have chosen 192.168.1.65 as my server node IP address. This is out of my home router’s DHCP block so that I won’t have any conflicts. I’ve set the gateway address to 192.168.1.254 (my DSL router) and used the normal 255.255.255.0 netmask.

Once the network has been configured, you will move on to disk partitioning. This shows standard Linux disk partitioning screens.

Caution

To complete this installation and use nova-volume, you need to have one extra empty partition. This can be an extra hard drive in your machine, an external hard drive, or extra partition. If you only have only one hard drive (like the machine in this example), you should create an unused partition in this step. If you don’t, you’ll need an external hard drive to complete the install. In my example, I simply plugged a 16GB flash drive into the USB port.

After the disk is partitioned and formatted, the base operating system and OpenStack packages will be installed. This will take a while. When it is finished, pop out the CD or USB stick and reboot the machine. It should boot to the command prompt, as shown in Figure 7-2.

Figure 7-2. StackOps Login Screen

Now that the machine is up and running, let’s test to make sure everything went all right before we move on to configuring our cloud. Login to the server as the “root” user with the password “stackops” to get a root user prompt. Check to make sure that the StackOps agent is running by checking its log file:

# more /var/log/nova/installer-agent.py.log
2011-07-04 11:28:14-0700 [-] Log opened.
2011-07-04 11:28:14-0700 [-] Starting server: 2011-07-04 11:28:14.515648
2011-07-04 11:28:14-0700 [-] twisted.web.server.Site starting on 8888

Configure with Smart Installer

With the basic distro successfully installed, it is now time to configure the Nova software. StackOps has an agent-based “Smart Installer” that guides you through the configuration process, gives you intelligent defaults, and then applies the configuration to your newly installed server. While we are only using it for a simple single-node install here, it will also configure and apply to multiple servers according to their role in the deployment scenario.

The first step in running the Smart Installer is to connect a web browser to the address shown in the banner of your server’s login screen. This should be an address in the form of http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8888/, where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your server’s IP address. Once you connect to that address, you will be redirected to Smart Installer login screen.

Note

Your browser will need to have access to the Internet. It acts as a middleman between the two, gathering config data from your server and transferring to the configuration web application. Your server does not need access to the Internet.

The first screen of the Smart Installer will ask you to create an account and then login. While creating an account is not a necessity, it will allow you to save, edit, and redeploy your configurations later. Figure 7-3 shows the login screen.

Figure 7-3. StackOps Smart Installer Login

Once registered and logged in, the Smart Installer will step you through a number of screens to configure your Nova deployment. The first screen is the most important: choosing your deployment scenario (Figure 7-4). We will be using the “single node” scenario.

Figure 7-4. StackOps Deployment Architecture

Next, it will help you configure your controller functions (nova-api, networks, database, queue, etc.) of your installation. The first of these screens will review your hardware configuration, as shown in Figure 7-5.

Figure 7-5. StackOps Smart Installer Hardware Review

Once you review the hardware configurations, you can advance to the software requirements screen. This is also a read-only screen, and after reviewing your server network configuration, you can go on to the next screen.

The next screen shows the configuration options for network topologies. Since we are using a single-interface test server, we don’t need to change anything (it should be preset to your eth0 interface). In more advanced deployment scenarios, this screen lets you assign separate service, storage, and public networks. Advance to the next screen.

The next screen is the most important screen of our configuration. It shows the global service options. This screen allows you to customize the configurations for:

• Database

• Queue

• EC2 API

• S3 repository

• Authentication

• Logging

• Network

Of all these options, the only one that we must edit is the network section. Figure 7-6 shows the networking options.

Figure 7-6. StackOps Smart Installer Global Networking

Pay close attention these configurations. Misconfiguring this step will result in your instances not starting or being unable to be reached. Use the following guidelines for these options:

• type: Choose your network manager. We will leave this at nova.network.manager.FlatDHCPManager.

• fixed_range: Choose your fixed (private) IP address range. It is fine to use the default 10.0.0.0/8 range as long as this does not conflict with your current network settings. As I use the 192.168.1.0/24 range on my internal network, I will leave the default.

• network size: Choose the size of your fixed IP range. For this single node installation, this is not relevant, but we will make it smaller. My test server uses 8.

• floating range: This is the most important entry. Enter the range for your floating IPs (public addresses) that are available on your network. Since my internal network uses the 192.168.1.0/24 range, I have configured my router to only give out IP addresses in the 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.64 range. I decided to have my instances use the addresses in the 192.168.1.129 - 192.168.1.134 range. Consulting my handy subnet calculator, I used 192.168.1.128/29 for this entry.

Caution

This is the most likely place that your installation will go wrong. Make sure that you carefully plan and review your entries here. If you are in doubt, consult your local network administrator.

When you are satisfied with your network options, move on to the compute screen. All the options on this screen should be fine for our test installation. The only option that you might want to review is your libvirt type. This pull-down menu lets you choose between QEMU and KVM virtualization. Unless you do not have a KVM capable machine, you should leave it on KVM.

The final configuration screen for the Smart Installer is the volume options. You may need to change the lvm_device option to the device path for your empty partition that you created during the Install Operating System step.

Caution

As the screen says, “Choose a device that you are 100% sure is not already in use!” This device will be completely erased. I usually use a blank USB stick for this step and choose /dev/sdb1 from the pull-down menu.

With the volume configuration done, you are ready to install your configuration to your server, as shown in Figure 7-7.

Figure 7-7. StackOps Smart Installer Ready To Install

# export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/nova/bin/

# nova-manage service list
nova-controller nova-compute enabled  :-) 2011-07-07 06:53:05
nova-controller nova-network enabled  :-) 2011-07-07 06:52:58
nova-controller nova-scheduler enabled  :-) 2011-07-07 06:53:04
nova-controller nova-volume enabled  :-) 2011-07-07 06:53:04