One of the great advantages of integrating Windows solutions in the OpenStack ecosystem is the ease of management and deployment. Cinder is no exception as you will see right away.

All you need to start is a physical or virtual host running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Storage Server 2012 and a copy of our Cinder volume installer available for free here.

Here’s our welcome screen:

Once you get through the license and the folder selection screens, you will be asked for the cinder.conf options as in the following screenshot. The great advantage is that the installer will create all the configuration files for you, without having to look around for obscure options by yourself

The Windows iSCSI LUNs path is the folder where the Microsoft iSCSI Target Service will create a VHD for each volume, so it is best to choose an appropriate data partition if available.

The next step consist in providing the optional logging options:

That’s it! One last confirmation screen and the setup will start. Another great advantage of this setup is that it will take care of all the dependencies, including Python, the iSCSI Target Service, the cinder-volume Windows service and so on.

Once the setup is finished, the cinder-volume service will start and you can check the logs (in the path configured above) to see if the service is properly connected to your controller.

You can restart the service from the Windows Service GUI tool or via command line with:

net stop cinder-volume
net start cinder-volume

To test your new volume server, you can connect to your OpenStack controller and create a simple volume:

cinder create 1

This command creates a 1GB volume. You can now check the status of your new volume:

cinder list

The Windows Cinder Volume driver works perfectly well with Nova on any Hypervisor, including support for the boot from volume feature. Great kudos go to Pedro Navarro Pérez who contributed the Windows volume driver to the Cinder project!
 

The post Cinder-Volume on Windows Storage Server 2012 appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

Well, until recently there were very limited options, but the great news is that we just released cloudbase-init, an open source project that brings the features that are handled by cloud-init on Linux to Windows (and soon FreeBSD as well)!

Some quick facts about it:

• Supports HTTP and ConfigDriveV2 metadata sources
• Provides out the box: user creation, password injection, static networking configuration, hostname, SSH public keys and userdata scripts (Powershell, Cmd or Bash)
• It’s highly modular and can be easily extended to provide support for a lot of features and metadata sources.
• Works on any hypervisor (Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, etc)
• Works on Windows Server 2003 / 2003 R2 / 2008 / 2008 R2 / 2012 and Windows 7 and 8.
• It’s platform independent, meaning that we plan to add other OSs, e.g.: FreeBSD
• Written in Python
• Open source, Apache 2 licensed

To simplify things even more, here’s a free installer

The installer takes care of everything, including installing a dedicated Python environment, generating a configuration file and creating a Windows service that runs at boot time. Configuration settings like the username, group membership and the network adapter to be configured can be specified during setup or later by editing the configuration file (cloudbase-init.conf).

After the setup finishes, you’ll find a new service called “Cloud Initialization Service”. The service is not started yet, it wil start automatically at the next boot. All you have to do now is shutting down your VM and upload the image to Glance.

When the service runs for the first time at boot, it will look for a metadata data source by checking the available ones in the order provided in the cloudbase-init.conf file. By default it looks for the ConfigDrive and then for the classic HTTP Url on 169.254.169.254 (IP address configurable in the conf file).

After retrieving the metadata, the service executes a list of plugins:

cloudbaseinit.plugins.windows.sethostname.SetHostNamePlugin

Sets the instance’s hostname. It triggers an automatic reboot to apply it.

cloudbaseinit.plugins.windows.createuser.CreateUserPlugin

Creates / updates a local user, setting the password provided in the metadata (admin_pass). The user is then added to a set of local groups. The following configuration parameters control the behaviour of this plugin:

• username: default: Admin
• groups: Comma separated list of groups. Default: Administrators
• inject_user_password: Can be set to false to avoid the injection of the password provided in the metadata. Default: True

cloudbaseinit.plugins.windows.networkconfig.NetworkConfigPlugin

Configures static networking.

• network_adapter: Network adapter to configure. If not specified, the first available ethernet adapter will be chosen. Default: None

cloudbaseinit.plugins.windows.sshpublickeys.SetUserSSHPublicKeysPlugin

Creates an “authorized_keys” file in the user’s home directory containing the SSH keys provided in the metadata.

Note: on Windows, starting with Grizzly, the public key is needed to encrypt the user’s password.

cloudbaseinit.plugins.windows.userdata.UserDataPlugin

Executes custom scripts provided with the user_data metadata (plain text or compressed with gzip).

Supported formats:

Windows batch

The file is executed in a cmd.exe shell (can be changed with the COMSPEC environment variable). The user_data first line must be: rem cmd

Powershell

Scripting is automatically enabled if not set (RemoteSigned). The user_data first line must be: #ps1

Bash

A bash shell needs to be installed in the system and available in the PATH in order to use this feature. The user_data first line must start with: #!

When the configuration is done, the service saves a value in the Windows registry to avoid the execution of the same plugins on the next boot. In order to trigger again the execution of the configuration scripts, just remove the following Registry key and restart the service or reboot:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Cloudbase Solutions\Cloudbase-Init

Note: on 64 bit versions of Windows, the key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Cloudbase Solutions\Cloudbase-Init

Unattended setup

The setup can be done in silent mode as well, which means that it can be easily integrated in a Puppet, Chef or Windows GPO deployment strategy.

Here’s the basic syntax, with an additional optional log file to verify that everything worked fine:

msiexec /i CloudbaseInitSetup.msi /qn /l*v log.txt

You can also pass parameters, for example to specify the ethernet adapter to be configured:

msiexec /i CloudbaseInitSetup.msi /qn /l*v log.txt NETWORKADAPTERNAME="Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Network Connection"

The post Cloud-Init for Windows instances appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

Hyper-V Server 2012 is free and can be downloaded from here . The installation is very simple and straightforward as with any Windows Server solution. You can use of course also the full Windows Server 2012 , but unless you are really missing the GUI features, there’s no need for it.

Another great option for development consists in enabling the Hyper-V role on Windows 8 (Pro or Enterprise). If you have a Mac, Linux or Windows 7 you can run both Hyper-V and DevStack virtualized on VMWare Fusion 5 / Workstation 9.

To make things even easier, in this guide we’ll run DevStack in a VM on top of the Hyper-V compute node. Hyper-V is not particularly picky about hardware, which means that there’s no need for expensive servers to be used for test and development.

The DevStack VM

Let’s start by downloading an Ubuntu Server 12.04 ISO image and create a VM on Hyper-V. Since Hyper-V Server does not provide a GUI, you can do that from a separate host (Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012) or you can issue some simple Powershell commands.
Here’s how to download the Ubuntu ISO image via Powershell:

$isourl = "http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.04/ubuntu-12.04.1-server-amd64.iso"
$isopath = "C:\ISO\ubuntu-12.04.1-server-amd64.iso"
Invoke-WebRequest -uri $isourl -OutFile $isopath

You will need an external virtual switch, in order for the VMs to communicate with the external world (including Internet for our DevStack VM). You can of course skip this step if you already created one.

$net = Get-NetAdapter
$vmswitch = new-vmswitch External -NetAdapterName $net[0].Name -AllowManagementOS $True

Finally here’s how to create and start the DevStack VM, with 1 GB RAM and 15 GB HDD, a virtual network adapter attached to the external switch and the Ubuntu ISO attached to the DVD for the installation.

$vm = new-VM "DevStack" -MemoryStartupBytes (1024*1024*1024) -NewVHDPath "C:\VHD\DevStack.vhdx" -NewVHDSizeBytes (15*1024*1024*1024)
Set-VMDvdDrive $vm.Name -Path $isopath
Connect-VMNetworkAdapter $vm.Name -SwitchName $vmswitch.Name
Start-VM $vm

Now it’s time to connect to the VM console and install Ubuntu. All we need is a basic installation with SSH. DevStack will take care of the rest.

Console access

The free Hyper-V Server does not provide a console UI application, so we have two options:

1. Access the server from another host using Hyper-V Manager on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012
2. Using our free FreeRDP based solution directly from the Hyper-V server

We’ll choose the latter in this guide as we simply love it.

In Powershell from the directory in which you unzipped FreerDP run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Import-Module .\PSFreeRDP.ps1

And now we can finally access the console of our new VM:

Get-VMConsole DevStack

Once you are done with the Ubuntu setup, we can go on and deploy DevStack. My suggestion is to connect to the Ubuntu VM via SSH, as it’s way easier especially for pasting commands. In case you should need an SSH client for Windows, Putty is a great (and free) option.
Let’s  start by adding an NTP daemon as time synchronization issues are a typical source of headaches in OpenStack:

sudo apt-get install ntp
sudo service ntp start

We need Git to download DevStack:

sudo apt-get install git

Installing and running DevStack is easy:

git clone git://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
cd devstack
./stack.sh

The script will ask you for a few passwords. You will find them in the “devstack/localrc” file afterwards.
In case you should prefer to run a specific version of the OpenStack components instead of the latest Grizzly bits, just add the branch name to the git clone command, e.g.:

git clone git://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git -b stable/folsom

Now edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following lines at the end, in order to have your environment ready whenever you log in:

export OS_TENANT_NAME=admin
export OS_USERNAME=admin
export OS_PASSWORD=yourpassword
export OS_AUTH_URL="http://localhost:5000/v2.0/"

And reload it with:

source ~/.bashrc

It’s time to add an image to Glance in order to spawn VMs on Hyper-V. To save you some time we prepared a ready made Ubuntu VM image. When you create your own, remember to use the VHD format and not VHDX.

wget http://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/UbuntuServer1204_cloudinit.zip
unzip UbuntuServer1204_cloudinit.zip
glance image-create --name "Ubuntu Server 12.04" --property hypervisor_type=hyperv --container-format bare --disk-format vhd < UbuntuServer1204.vhd

Note the hypervisor_type property. By specifying it, we are asking Nova Scheduler to use this image on Hyper-V compute nodes only, which means that you can have a mix of KVM, Xen or Hyper-V nodes in your stack, letting Nova Scheduler taking care of it any time you boot a new image, a great feature IMO!
We are almost done. Let’s create a new keypair and save the private key in your user’s home:

test -d ~/.ssh || mkdir ~/.ssh
nova keypair-add key1 >> ~/.ssh/id_rsa
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Ok, we are done with DevStack so far. We need to setup our Hyper-V Nova Compute node, which is even easier thanks to the installer that we released . Let’s go back to the Powershell:

$src = "http://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/HyperVNovaCompute_Beta.msi"
$dest = "$env:temp\HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi"
Invoke-WebRequest -uri $src -OutFile $dest
Unblock-File $dest
Start-Process $dest

The installation is very easy, just follow the steps available here!
Remember to specify the IP address of your DevStack VM for Glance and RabbitMQ. As Nova database connection string you can simply use: mysql://root:YourDevStackPassword@YourDevstackIP/nova

(Note: never use “root” in a production environment!)

Now let’s go back to DevStack and check that all the services are up and running:

nova-manage service list

You should see a smile “:-)” close to each service and no “XXX”.

Now it’s time to boot our first OpenStack VM:

nova boot --flavor 1 --image "Ubuntu Server 12.04" --key-name key1 vm1

You can check the progress and status of your VM with:

nova list

The first time that you boot an instance it will take a few minutes, depending on the size of your Glance image, as the image itself gets cached on the compute node. Subsequent image boots will be very fast.

Some useful tips

How to delete all the VM at once from the command line

During testing you’ll need to cleanup all the instances quite often. Here’s a simple script to do that on Linux without issuing single “nova delete” commands for every instance:

nova list | awk '{if (NR > 3 && $2 != "") {system("nova delete " $2);}}'

How to update DevStack

I typically run the following script from the DevStack folder after a reboot to update the OpenStack components (Nova, Glance, etc) and the DevStack scripts, just before running stack.sh

git pull
pushd .
cd /opt/stack/nova
git pull
cd /opt/stack/glance
git pull
cd /opt/stack/cinder
git pull
cd /opt/stack/keystone
git pull
cd /opt/stack/horizon
git pull
cd /opt/stack/python-glanceclient
git pull
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install --force 
cd /opt/stack/python-novaclient
git pull
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install --force
cd /opt/stack/python-cinderclient
git pull
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install --force
cd /opt/stack/python-keystoneclient
git pull
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install --force
popd

How to check your OpenStack versions

All the components in your stack need to share the same OpenStack version. Don’t mix Grizzly and Folsom components!! Here’s how to check what Nova version you are running:

python -c "from nova import version; print version.NOVA_VERSION"

For Grizzly you will get: ['2013, '1', '0']  (the last number might also be “None”).

The post DevStack on Hyper-V appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

Exception Value: /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

Here’s the solution, tested on 12.04 and 12.10:

sudo apt-get install node-less
mkdir -p /opt/stack/horizon/bin/less
ln -s /usr/bin/lessc /opt/stack/horizon/bin/less/lessc 

On Ubuntu 12.10 you will also need nodejs-legacy:

apt-get install nodejs-legacy

The post How to solve DevStack error “Exception Value: /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory” appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

How can you tell Nova Scheduler to associate a given Glance image to a specific hypervisor?

The answer is provided by a filter called ImagePropertiesFilter, enabled by default in Nova Scheduler. This filter looks for a Glance image property called “hypervisor_type” which must contain a value matching with the desired hypervisor type as the name implies. Images without this property set will simply be booted on any available hypervisor, unless other filter will influence the scheduler’s behaviour.

Here’s how to add an image which will boot only on Hyper-V Nova Compute hosts:

glance image-create --property hypervisor_type=hyperv --name "Ubuntu Server 12.04" 
--container-format bare --disk-format vhd < UbuntuServer1204.vhd

Changing the property on an existing image is also very simple:

glance image-update --property hypervisor_type=hyperv <IMAGE_ID>

This feature is supported in the current Hyper-V Grizzly code, already included in our daily updated beta installer.

It can also be easily backported to Folsom, all you need to do is to copy the content of the “nova/virt/hyperv/” folder available in the source repository on github to the corresponding folder in your Hyper-V Nova Compute node.

The post Filtering Glance images for Hyper-V appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

One of our goals was being able to install and configure Nova compute on Hyper-V in the simplest possible way, using a nice and tidy GUI for the occasional deployment or an automated and unattended mode for deployments on a massive number of servers. The result is the installer that I’m going to present in this post, I have to admit that we are quite proud of it

To begin, all you need is an installation of the Microsoft free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 or 2012 or as an alternative Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 with the Hyper-V role enabled.

We suggest to use the free Hyper-V Server edition instead of Windows Server for a few reasons:

1. It’s free
2. It runs a very limited subset of the Windows Server operating system, which means that it has a lower impact on security updates and management
3. There’s no difference in features or performance compared to the full Windows Server

If you want to see how Hyper-V works with OpenStack but you don’t have a server or PC on which to install it, well you can even run it on top of another hypervisor (for test purposes only, this is of course TOTALLY unsupported). As an example you can run it in a VM on top of VMWare Workstation 9, Fusion 5 or ESXi 5.

Hyper-V Nova Compute Installer

We are going to install on Hyper-V only the OpenStack Compute role, so you’ll need to run the other required roles on separate hosts or VMs. If you don’t plan to deploy it in a production environment, I suggest you to create an Ubuntu Server 12.04 VM in Hyper-V or elsewhere with a DevStack deployment.

Once your Hyper-V setup is done, you can copy our installer on a folder on the server and run it.
On Hyper-V / Windows Server 2012, you can even download and run it directly from a Powershell prompt:

$src = ‘http://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi’
$dest = “$env:temp\HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi”
Invoke-WebRequest -uri $src -OutFile $dest
Unblock-File $dest
Start-Process $dest

Here’s how the welcome screen look like:

After accepting the license agreement the features selection will appear:

OpenStack Nova Compute

This is the core feature of the package. It installs a dedicated Python environment, all required dependencies and a Windows service called nova-compute. By clicking on “Browse” it is possible to change the installation folder.

Live Migration

Available on 2012 but not in 2008 R2, requires the host to be a member of a domain (can be even a Samba domain). This feature enables and configures Hyper-V “shared nothing” live migration. Beside KVM, Hyper-V is the only OpenStack hypervisor supporting it, with the additional advantage that thanks to this installer it’s unbelievably easy to setup!

iSCSI Initiator Service

Enables and starts the Microsoft iSCSI initiator service, required for Cinder volume management.

OpenStack Command Prompt

Creates  an OpenStack command prompt shortcut. This is especially useful on Windows Server or on a workstation in order to have a ready made environment with the PATH and other environment variables properly set.

FreeRDP for Hyper-V

FreeRDP is an amazing cross platform open source RDP client that works also with the Hyper-V RDP extensions required to connect to VM consoles. I blogged here in detail about it.

The next steps are required to handle the service configurations and are displayed in function of the selected features.

Nova compute requires one bridge (virtual switch in Hyper-V terms), which can be automatically created by the installer.

The basic configuration consists in providing the settings for the glance server address, RabbitMQ server address, Nova database and the path where the Nova compute driver will save the Hyper-V instances and Glance images.

“Limit CPU features” is required when live migration is used between servers with different CPU architectures.
When “Use CoW Images” is enabled, the Nova compute driver creates differencing disks based on the glance VHD images, instead of copying the entire image for each spawned instance. This leads to massively shorter instance deployment times.

Here’s one of my favorite parts. Live migration can be configured here without having to use Microsoft Hyper-V Manager or Powershell. All you have to do is to choose the authentication type (we suggest Kerberos), the maximum number of parallel live migrations, and IP limitations if needed. Please note also that live migration requires that the Nova Compute service runs with domain credentials. The selected domain user will be automatically added to the local administrators group.

Now lean back, relax, and wait for the installer to do his job
During this step files get copied, services and components get registered, the nova.conf file is written and finally the nova-compute service is started

Once the setup is finished, you can always start it again to change / add / remove any feature.

FAQ

here’s also a quick FAQ for activities that you might need to perform on the Hyper-V server.

How do I restart the compute service?

net stop nova-compute && net start nova-compute

How do I restart the iSCSI initiator service service?

net stop msiscsi && net start msiscsi

How do I perform an unattended setup

You can find here all the supported properties and a full example.

How do I log the installer activity?

msiexec /i HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi /l*v log.txt

How do I uninstall this package if I don’t have the MSI file?

msiexec /uninstall {792BADAA-8FE0-473C-BAD7-CAFA2AFF4F2D}

The post Installing OpenStack Nova Compute on Hyper-V appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

There are unfortunately quite a few limitations in this approach, including the fact that is not available on the Hyper-V host itself or on other operating systems.

Hyper-V console access is based on an extension of the RDP protocol, which is implemented in the Remote Desktop Services ActiveX Client control (mstscax.dll) used by vmconnect and by the RDP client itself (mstsc.exe).

Enter FreeRDP

Microsoft opened up their RDP protocol, including the extensions required by Hyper-V, which led to having FreeRDP implementing it. FreeRDP is without any doubt one of the most promising open source projects in terms of interoperability with the Microsoft world with a great developers team behind it.

The great news is that it’s now possible to access a Hyper-V console from Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Here’s how. I’m going to present a “hard”, way using directly FreeRDP and a easier way using a Powershell script to get the required details from HyperV.

Support for Hyper-V is not yet available in the latest FreeRDP release, so all you need to do is to download the latest sources and compile them. To spare you some work here are the precompiled binaries for Windows. As a prerequisite you need to install the Visual C++ 2012 x86 runtime.

Connecting with FreeRDP

First you need to get the Id of the VM to which you want to connect. This can be done in Powershell on Windows Server / Hyper-V Server 2012 or Windows 8 with:

Get-VM <vmname> | Select-Object Id

On Windows Server / Hyper-V Server 2008 and 2008 R2 you can use PSHyperV as the Cmdlets introduced with the new Hyper-V version are not available.

To connect from Linux or Mac OS X:

xfreerdp –ignore-certificate –no-nego -u <username> –pcb <vmid> -t 2179  <hypervhost>

On Windows you can use the same command line but authentication is handled by the OS. In particular, in order to connect to a different host not in the same domain or without passthrough authentication you can use cmdkey.

wfreerdp –ignore-certificate –no-nego  –pcb <vmid> -t 2179  <hypervhost>

If you need to authenticate on the server, before wfreerdp run:

cmdkey /add:<hypervhost> /user:<username> /pass

A Powershell Cmdlet to ease up things.

The process described above, involving getting the VM Id before running FreeRDP might become a bit annoying if you need to do it frequently. Here’s also a Powershell Cmdlet that I wrote to simplify your work.

Some examples.

First you need to enable the execution of Powershell scripts on the host if you didn’t do it before:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Now you can import the module:

Import-Module .\PSFreeRDP.ps1

Now, to access the console on the “instance-00000001″ virtual machine on the local Hyper-V host:

Get-VMConsole instance-00000001

To access the console of a VM on a remote server:

Get-VMConsole instance-00000001 -HyperVHost RemoteServer

To access the console on all the running instances (be careful! ):

Get-VM | where {$_.State -eq “Running”} | Get-VMConsole

As you can see some Powershell magic can ease up a lot of work!

Download FreeRDP for Windows and Powershell Cmdlet

We love FreeRDP to the point that we bundled it with our OpenStack installer. This way the entire Hyper-V compute management can be done in a completely autonomous way.

The post Using FreeRDP to connect to the Hyper-V console appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.

We did a huge amount of work lately bringing OpenStack to the Microsoft world, including the new Hyper-V Nova Compute driver, accepted in the OpenStack source code in time for the Folsom release!

Check out our installer for deploying the compute driver on Hyper-V and if you’ll come to visit us in San Diego we will show you what we are working on for the Grizzly release… you won’t be disappointed, promise

The post SD here we come appeared first on Cloudbase Solutions.