vagrant-packstack

This vagrant environment runs CentOS 7 and the Packstack installer for an all-in-one OpenStack environment.

Prereqs

• VirtualBox
• Configure a NAT Network VBoxManage natnetwork add --netname packstack --network 172.16.1.0/24 --enable
• vagrant-hostmanager
• vagrant-timezone
• ansible mkvirtualenv vagrant-packstack -r requirements.txt
• 8GB of ram is needed by the virt

Start the show

1. Once you have your environment up, do vagrant up to start the virt and installation. Note this takes a while, go get some coffee...

There is a chance of a failure on the last provisioning step (Restart Networking), this is not a fatal error and you can continue

OpenStack Orchestration via Ansible

Next up we need to setup OpenStack with a way to let instances get to the outside world, this is called the provider network. We'll also setup a project and user for doing things not with the admin user, and then create something.

2. Setup the external provider network and "vagrant" project/user in openstack:

3. source provisioning/openstack/keystonerc_admin

4. ansible-playbook provisioning/openstack/admin-setup-tasks.yml

5. Lets make something:

6. source provisioning/openstack/keystonerc_vagrant

7. ansible-playbook provisioning/openstack/vagrant-demo.yml

After it is online, visit http://packstack.vagrant/dashboard with the creds found in provisioning/openstack/keystonerc_[admin|vagrant] or use the openstack client.

Networking

The vagrant is configured with three interfaces:

1. The default interface used by vagrant to control the box
2. Used by OpenStack for API access from the host
3. Used by OpenStack for external access for instances to reach the internet

Due to the limitations of the NAT Network and Host-Only interfaces, we are not able to reach instances directly from host, but only locally from within the vagrant. All signs point to VirtualBox filtering these interfaces before they reach the guest. A thought was to use Bridged networking, but that is too dependent on someone's networking environment that I could not write a portable environment to handle all cases.

Customizing Packstack

Currently the Packstack installer is customized via command line options. If you wish to further customize the installer, update the command in provisioning/vagrant/packstack-install.yml. Running packstack --help will display all the available options. Note, the more services you enable, the more memory used.

VMWare Fusion

VMWare Fusion doesn't have these network limitations and so we don't need that third NAT Network interface and are able to directly access instances from the host.

References:

• https://www.rdoproject.org/networking/neutron-with-existing-external-network/
• https://www.rdoproject.org/networking/networking-in-too-much-detail/
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/list_of_cloud_modules.html#openstack