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Downloading and installing devstack

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The following instructions assume you have a running Linux virtual machine that can support the installation of devstack to demonstrate a simple working OpenStack cloud.

For more information about the preparation needed for this step, see these pre-requisite instructions:

Pre-requisites

You will need to login to your Linux virtual machine as a normal user (e.g. stack if you followed these instructions).

To verify the IP address of your machine you can run:

$ ifconfig eth1

NOTE: This assumes you configured a second network adapter as detailed.

You need to determine the IP address assigned. If this is your first-time using VirtualBox and this was configured with default settings, the value will be 192.168.56.101

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:db:42:6e  
          inet addr:192.168.56.101  Bcast:192.168.56.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fedb:426e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:398500 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:282829 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:35975184 (35.9 MB)  TX bytes:59304714 (59.3 MB)

Verify that you have applicable sudo privileges.

$ sudo id

If you are prompted for a password, then your privileges are not configured correctly. See here.

Download devstack

After connecting to the virtual machine the following commands will download the devstack source code:

$ sudo apt-get install -y git-core
# NOTE: You will not be prompted for a password
#       This is important for the following installation steps
$ git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack

Configure devstack

The following will create an example configuration file suitable for a default devstack installation.

$ cd devstack
# Use the sample default configuration file
$ cp samples/local.conf .
$ HOST_IP="192.168.56.101"
$ echo "HOST_IP=${HOST_IP}" >> local.conf

NOTE: If your machine has different IP address you should specify this alternative value.

Install devstack

$ ./stack.sh

Depending on your physical hardware and network connection, this takes approximately 20 minutes.

When completed you will see the following:

...
This is your host IP address: 192.168.56.101
This is your host IPv6 address: ::1
Horizon is now available at http://192.168.56.101/dashboard
Keystone is serving at http://192.168.56.101:5000/
The default users are: admin and demo
The password: nomoresecrete
While the installation of devstack is happening, you should read Configuration section, and look at the devstack/samples/local.conf sample configuration file being used.

Accessing devstack

You now have a running OpenStack cloud. There are two easy ways to access the running services to verify.

  • Connect the Horizon dashboard in your browser with the URL (e.g. http://192.168.56.101/), and use the user and password described (e.g. admin and nomoresecrete).
  • Use the OpenStack client that is installed with devstack, for example:
$ source accrc/admin/admin
$ openstack image list

See Using your devstack cloud for more information about analyzing your running cloud, restarting services, configuration files and how to demonstrate a code change.

Other devstack commands

There are some useful commands to know about with your devstack setup.

If you restart your virtual machine, you reconnect to devstack by re-running the installation (there is no longer a rejoin-stack.sh):

$ ./stack.sh

To shutdown a running devstack.

$ ./unstack.sh

To cleanup your VM of devstack installed software.

$ ./clean.sh

Installing Openstack with devstack, a first-time guide

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This guide will enable the reader to install a minimal OpenStack cloud using devstack for the first time.

This guide will assume you have never installed virtualization software, used or configured devstack or even observed a running OpenStack cloud. This guide does assume that you can perform some basic software development instructions as documented.

This guide is targeted towards the software developer that may want to review the Python code and contribute to the open source project or the system architect that wants to evaluate some of the features of OpenStack. If you are an end user should try a public cloud that runs OpenStack such as OVH, Rackspace or other public cloud providers listed in the OpenStack Marketplace).

There are some hardware requirements and various copy/paste command line instructions on a Linux virtual machine. While it would be possible to publish a completed virtual machine you could download and click to run, understanding the underpinnings of the most basic installation and configuration of devstack will provide an appreciation of the complexity of the product and the software development capabilities.

At the end of this process you will have a running OpenStack cloud on your computer that is running on a Linux virtual machine. You will be able to access this with your browser and be able to perform basic cloud infrastructure tasks, such as creating a compute instance. This guide is not intended to talk about the benefits or usages of a cloud.

You will need a computer running Mac OS X, Windows, Linux (see supported list) or Solaris with at least 4GB of RAM and 10GB of available disk drive space in order to complete the following steps.

  1. Installing VirtualBox
  2. Setting up an Ubuntu virtual machine using VirtualBox
  3. ‎Downloading and installing devstack
  4. Using your OpenStack devstack cloud
NOTE: These steps will provide one means of installing devstack with one type of virtualization software on a specific Linux operating system. This is only meant as a first-time users guide, and some pre-defined decisions have been made. There are multiple ways to implement and use devstack with different software and operating systems.

What’s next?

Without knowing the purpose of following this first-time guide what’s next depends on your. As a software developer you may be interested in looking OpenStack Bugs or contributing to new features of one of the many projects. As an architect you may want to understand a more complex configuration setup as you plan to determine what may be necessary to utilize a cloud infrastructure in your organization. This guide is only intended as the first introduction and hopefully has provided the intended result for the reader to consider what OpenStack can possibly provide.

More references

We will assume you have never installed virtualization software on your computer and have not installed devstack, or even seen an OpenStack interface. The devstack documentation does not make this assumption and so these more generic instructions are useful to the uninitiated. While some (including this author) feel these are instructions worthy of the official devstack documentation, others (with valid reasons) do not and hence the democracy of a large distributed open source project. For more information see review #290854. This guide joins the many others searchable by Internet search engines.

Virtual Box, a world of hurt

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I successfully installed Virtual box via a few simply apt-get commands under Ubuntu 8.04 via these instructions.

It started fine, after two small annoying, install this module, add this group messages. I was even able to install Ubuntu Intrepid from .iso. But from here it was down hill.

Attempting to start VM gives the error.

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for the CPU

Some digging around, and confirmation that the current packaged version of Virtual Box doesn’t support PAE. You think they could tell you before successfully installing an OS. I’m running 1.5.6, I need 1.6.x

$ dpkg -l | grep virtualbox
ii  virtualbox-ose                             1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - binaries
ii  virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic   24.0.4                                   virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-2.6.24
ii  virtualbox-ose-source                      1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - kernel module

Off to the Virtual Box Downloads to get 1.6.4
Don’t make the same mistake as I did and use the first download link, that’s the commercial version that doesn’t install what you expect, you need the OSE. Of course this is not packaged, it’s only source.

  ./configure
Checking for environment: Determined build machine: linux.x86, target machine: linux.x86, OK.
Checking for kBuild: found, OK.
Checking for gcc: found version 4.2.3, OK.
Checking for as86:
  ** as86 (variable AS86) not found!

Ok, well I go through this step like 4 times, installing one package at a time, I wish they could do a pre-check and give you all missing requirements. I installed bin86, bcc, iasl.

Then I got to the following error.

$ ./configure
...
Checking for libxml2:
  ** not found!

Well it’s installed, all too hard. Throw Virtual Box away for virtualization software. And why am I using it anyway. Because VMWare Server doesn’t work under Ubuntu 8.04 either because of some ancient gcc dependency. Sees I may have to go back to that. I just want a working virtualization people on the most popular Linux distro to install other current distros. It’s not a difficult request.

$ dpkg -l | grep libxml
ii  libxml-parser-perl                         2.34-4.3                                 Perl module for parsing XML files
ii  libxml-twig-perl                           1:3.32-1                                 Perl module for processing huge XML document
ii  libxml2                                    2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     GNOME XML library
ii  libxml2-utils                              2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     XML utilities
ii  python-libxml2                             2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     Python bindings for the GNOME XML library