SUSE Openstack Cloud 6 on Ravello Systems

SUSE announced the general availability of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 earlier this month, based on the Liberty release of Openstack.  With the release, our team hustled to deliver SOC6 on a publicly available platform for demoing, dev, and test.  Some of the new features include:

• Docker support (technology preview)
• All nodes now run on SLES 12 SP1
• High availability for compute nodes
• z/VM support
• Addition of openstack services such as Manila, Ironic (tech preview)

For a more exhaustive list of new features and upgrades, please reference the release notes.

For our SOC4 and SOC5 releases, we had partnered with Ravello Systems to enable our partners and customers to easily and rapidly deploy SOC in a scalable environment, leveraging their nested virtualization technology.  SOC6 proves to be no exception, as this short blog will detail a quick run-through of how to deploy the blueprint (and meant as an addendum to my more detailed run-through of SOC5 found here).

Log into Ravello and add the corresponding SUSE Openstack Cloud 6 blueprint to your library:

Log into the Ravello Systems dashboard and launch the blueprint with your desired settings:

Once all the nodes are up and running (green), you may inspect the blueprint’s architecture if desired.  The base blueprint consists of a three node setup – one admin node (installer, crowbar, barclamps), one controller node (integral openstack services), and one compute node (neutron, glance, nova).  Inspect the admin node, copy and paste the public IP of the admin node into a new browser window to access the SUSE Openstack Cloud admin (Crowbar) dashboard, with credentials crowbar/crowbar when prompted:

The Crowbar dashboard allows for the deployment and modification of openstack services and of integration of openstack nodes, facilitating their installation, configuration management, and automation.  You may notice that some of the nodes are grey-ed out.  This is due to the order the nodes are deployed in when launching a blueprint.

If a node is greyed out, ensure that the chef-server service is running on the admin node.  Log in to the admin node via ssh (root/SUS3*2016) and check the status of the services ‘chef-server’ and ‘crowbar’ by typing ‘service chef-server status’, and ‘service crowbar status’.

If either of the services above are not running, start them by  typing ‘service chef-server restart’ and ‘service crowbar restart’.  For any of the greyed out nodes found on the admin/crowbar dashboard, log in via SSH (root/SUS3*2016) and type ‘service crowbar_join restart’.  As an example, restarting the crowbar_join service on the controller node:

Check the admin dashboard status again, to ensure all nodes are running properly:

Access the Horizon dashboard by selecting the controller node in the Ravello dashboard, and selecting the node’s public NIC IP, and input the IP into a new browser window.  Log in with credentials admin/crowbar:

The Horizon dashboard provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc.  It also allows users to easily launch, manage, and terminate the computing, storage, and network resources.  Go to the Project->Compute->Instances page, and you will see a pre-existing instance that is shut down:

Re-start the instance by clicking the ‘Start Instance’ button to the right.  The instance will boot-up.  Notice that the instance already has a floating IP assigned to it.  You may access the instance, externally, by selecting the corresponding NIC IP on the Ravello dashboard, which has already been setup for access to the controller node at 192.168.126.130.  Alternatively, you may access the built-in VNC console of the instance by replacing the internal address with the corresponding NIC address via the Ravello dashboard:

We have performed the following tasks in this run-through:

• Rapid deployment of SUSE Openstack Cloud 6
• Access admin/crowbar dashboard
• Access Horizon dashboard
• Launched a nova compute instance

For any further questions pertaining to SUSE Openstack Cloud 6, please feel free to contact me at tchong@suse.com