OpenStack KILO installation : Made simple

OpenStack’s latest release KILO is here and I decided to give it a spin. I will be performing the installation on CentOS 7 and what better way to try out OpenStack than Red Hat’s RDO. For starters RDO is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

I encountered a lot of errors during the installation and it was not as straight forward as mentioned in the RDO quick start guide. So the steps outlined here along with the changes are a result of my experience with the installation process. I performed some additional pre-requisites and ran some additional commands to ensure a smooth installation. The changes are highlighted in bold.

Pre-requisites:

-          A desktop/laptop with decent CPU, RAM & HDD.

-          A type-2 hypervisor like VMware Workstation, VMware Player or Virtualbox.

-          A Linux Virtual Machine or a Linux distro to create one. For KILO, CentOS 7 can be used. Distros like Fedora (21 or above), or similar ones based on Red Hat or Fedora like Cent OS (7 recommended), Scientific Linux will also do. I will be installing it on CentOS 7 as mentioned earlier.

I would highly recommend that if using RedHat, register the machine on RHN network. For those that don’t have one, you can get a 30 day trial but you need to use a corporate email address. 

Step 1:

Get a Linux Virtual Machine ready. If you don’t have one, use of the compatible distributions to create one. Be sure to provide at least 2GB RAM, 2 CPU cores and most importantly make sure “H/W Virtualization like Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” is enabled/checked in the virtual machine properties.

NAT worked fine for me but if you end up facing some issues with networking during installation or post installation change the networking mode to “Bridged“.

Once the virtual machine is ready, launch it.

Step 2:

After logging on to the Virtual Machine, open a terminal and run the below commands in order.

sudo setenforce permissive

This command is to ask SELinux not to enforce policies. I would recommend using this instead of disabling SELinux completely.

sudo yum update -y

The above command updates the current packages in the distribution. Mine was already the latest so there was nothing to do.

 sudo yum install -y http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm

This command installs the RDO repositories needed for the successful installation of OpenStack.

Additional step:

sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-optional-rpms

This command enables the optional RPMs which contains some of the dependency packages like rubygems and rubygem-json.

sudo yum install -y openstack-packstack 

Next step is to install the packstack utility which uses Puppet to deploy various components of OpenStack either in a single machine or multiple machines over network using SSH.

Additional step:

sudo yum install -y puppet

This command installs Puppet. I encountered numerous errors on multiple occasions during the installation related to Puppet, including a point where it failed to install Puppet properly too. So I decided to install it separately before starting the Packstack installation.

packstack --allinone 

This starts the OpenStack Icehouse installation.

Once installation is complete, you will get a summary with the IP address of the Horizon Dashboard and some other services. The successful completion will look something like this screenshot below.

Step 3:

You are now ready to test drive OpenStack KILO. Open a browser and point it to the IP address for Horizon Dashboard noted earlier. The default login is “admin” and in order to get the password for the first time login, open a terminal and run the commands below as root:

cat ~/keystonerc_admin

This will printout the keystone credential details for admin user, note down the password.

Enter username and password at the Horizon Dashboard login screen and sing in.

Overview of the fresh setup.

We are now ready to play around with OpenStack KILO. This was a simple one machine installation. RDO can also be used for multiple machine installation of course with some modifications and tweaks.

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