Getting Started With OpenStack

OpenStack is one the most popular cloud projects. It's an open source project to build public and/or private clouds. You can use Salt Cloud to launch OpenStack instances.

Dependencies

  • Libcloud >= 0.13.2

Configuration

  • Using the new format, set up the cloud configuration at /etc/salt/cloud.providers or /etc/salt/cloud.providers.d/openstack.conf:
my-openstack-config:
  # Set the location of the salt-master
  #
  minion:
    master: saltmaster.example.com

  # Configure the OpenStack driver
  #
  identity_url: http://identity.youopenstack.com/v2.0/tokens
  compute_name: nova
  protocol: ipv4

  compute_region: RegionOne

  # Configure Openstack authentication credentials
  #
  user: myname
  password: 123456
  # tenant is the project name
  tenant: myproject

  provider: openstack

  # skip SSL certificate validation (default false)
  insecure: false

Using nova client to get information from OpenStack

One of the best ways to get information about OpenStack is using the novaclient python package (available in pypi as python-novaclient). The client configuration is a set of environment variables that you can get from the Dashboard. Log in and then go to Project -> Access & security -> API Access and download the "OpenStack RC file". Then:

source /path/to/your/rcfile
nova credentials
nova endpoints

In the nova endpoints output you can see the information about compute_region and compute_name.

Compute Region

It depends on the OpenStack cluster that you are using. Please, have a look at the previous sections.

Authentication

The user and password is the same user as is used to log into the OpenStack Dashboard.

Profiles

Here is an example of a profile:

openstack_512:
  provider: my-openstack-config
  size: m1.tiny
  image: cirros-0.3.1-x86_64-uec
  ssh_key_file: /tmp/test.pem
  ssh_key_name: test
  ssh_interface: private_ips

The following list explains some of the important properties.

size
can be one of the options listed in the output of nova flavor-list.
image
can be one of the options listed in the output of nova image-list.
ssh_key_file
The SSH private key that the salt-cloud uses to SSH into the VM after its first booted in order to execute a command or script. This private key's public key must be the openstack public key inserted into the authorized_key's file of the VM's root user account.
ssh_key_name
The name of the openstack SSH public key that is inserted into the authorized_keys file of the VM's root user account. Prior to using this public key, you must use openstack commands or the horizon web UI to load that key into the tenant's account. Note that this openstack tenant must be the one you defined in the cloud provider.
ssh_interface
This option allows you to create a VM without a public IP. If this option is omitted and the VM does not have a public IP, then the salt-cloud waits for a certain period of time and then destroys the VM.

For more information concerning cloud profiles, see here.

change_password

If no ssh_key_file is provided, and the server already exists, change_password will use the api to change the root password of the server so that it can be bootstrapped.

change_password: True

userdata_file

Use userdata_file to specify the userdata file to upload for use with cloud-init if available.

userdata_file: /etc/salt/cloud-init/packages.yml