OpenStack: Virtual Image Instances using Horizon Dashboard

Install Addendum

Enable VT in BIOS

An addendum to install steps defined in my previous post OpenStack: Quick Install using DevStack is required to avoid a surprise that I encountered after the install. Please check to make sure BIOS is at latest version available from the system manufacturer and Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) is enabled in BIOS.

anil@OSCloud:~$ sudo apt-get install cpu-checker
anil@OSCloud:~$ sudo kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

If CPU doesn't support VT, the output will show CPU does not support KVM extensions.
The OpenStack Horizon Dashboard is implemented as a Python/Django web application that provides admin and user interface to OpenStack services.

Horizon Dashboard

Log in

In web browser, type the IP address for the dashboard. On Log In page enter User Name and Password and click Sign In. When signing in as Admin, the home page shows the Admin panel - System Panel - Overview.

Existing Virtual Machine Images

By clicking Images category in Admin - System panel on the left, a list of available images are viewed. In default installation, CirrOS x86_64 image is made available in AMI/ARI/AKI format.

CirrOS images are tiny cloud guest images with minimal Linux distribution that can also be downloaded from LaunchPad. The AMI/ARI/AKI is the image format supported by Amazon EC2. AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is a virtual machine raw image. ARI (Amazon Kernel Image) is a kernel file (vmlinuz) that will load initially to boot image. ARI (Amazon Ramdisk Image) is ramdisk file (initrd) mounted at boot time.

Launch Instances

Clicking on the Project tab in left panel shows the overview of current project.



To launch an instance from an image, click Images and Snapshot category in Project - Manage Compute panel on the left.



Select an image and click Launch. A Launch Instance modal pop-up appear. Enter a name in Instance Name field in Details tab.



In Access & Security tab, enter a passphrase in Admin Pass and Confirm Admin Pass fields.



Upon clicking Launch, Horizon dashboard switches to Project - Manage Compute - Instances page and shows the Instances running.



Clicking on Instance Name hyperlink shows the Instance Details for that specific instance with three tabs for Overview, Log and Console.



Though the Project - Manage Compute - Instances page shows instance to be Active and Running, the console for the instance is displaying an error message.

This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU.
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

Error Troubleshooting

A little bit of googling suggested to check whether the 64-bit PC (amd64, x86_64) or 32-bit PC (x86) version of host operating system is installed. Sure enough, the Ubuntu version installed on OSCloud host is x86 and not x86-64 version. I can't use x86-64 instance images on OSCloud host.

anil@OSCloud:~$ uname -a
Linux OSCloud 3.2.0-58-generic-pae #88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 18:00:02 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

After terminating the newly created instance test1 and deleting all x86_64 Images, the next step was to either find or build x86 images and start a new x86 instance.

Prebuilt Virtual Machine Images

As OSCloud host is using QEMU Hypervisor, it made sense to look for qcow2 (QEMU copy-on-write) format x86 images. At CirrOS download page, I found a bootable qcow disk image for i386 and decided to try it out.

Create Images

To create images, on Admin tab, select Images and then click Create Image button in right pane. On Create An Image page, enter Name for the image, select Image Source, Image Location, and Format. Select the Public checkbox to make available this image to everyone. Then click Create Image. The image will be queued for creation.



Once images are created, they will be available to launch instances in projects following the steps listed above in Launch Instances section.





In next blog post, I will start to dig deeper into high level solution design using OpenStack. Your feedback and comments are welcome.