Quick Start for deployment/evaluation

This guide provides step by step instructions to deploy OpenStack using Kolla Ansible on bare metal servers or virtual machines. For developers we have the developer quickstart.

Host machine requirements

The host machine must satisfy the following minimum requirements:

  • 2 network interfaces

  • 8GB main memory

  • 40GB disk space

See the support matrix for details of supported host Operating Systems. Kolla Ansible supports the default Python 3.x versions provided by the supported Operating Systems. For more information see tested runtimes.

Install dependencies

Typically commands that use the system package manager in this section must be run with root privileges.

It is generally recommended to use a virtual environment to install Kolla Ansible and its dependencies, to avoid conflicts with the system site packages. Note that this is independent from the use of a virtual environment for remote execution, which is described in Virtual Environments.

  1. For Debian or Ubuntu, update the package index.

    sudo apt update

  2. Install Python build dependencies:

    For CentOS or Rocky, run:

    sudo dnf install git python3-devel libffi-devel gcc openssl-devel python3-libselinux

    For Debian or Ubuntu, run:

    sudo apt install git python3-dev libffi-dev gcc libssl-dev

Install dependencies for the virtual environment

  1. Install the virtual environment dependencies.

    For CentOS or Rocky, you don’t need to do anything.

    For Debian or Ubuntu, run:

    sudo apt install python3-venv

  2. Create a virtual environment and activate it:

    python3 -m venv /path/to/venv
source /path/to/venv/bin/activate

    The virtual environment should be activated before running any commands that depend on packages installed in it.

  3. Ensure the latest version of pip is installed:

    pip install -U pip

  4. Install Ansible. Kolla Ansible requires at least Ansible 9 (or ansible-core 2.16) and supports up to 10 (or ansible-core 2.17).

    pip install 'ansible-core>=2.16,<2.17.99'

Install Kolla-ansible

  1. Install kolla-ansible and its dependencies using pip.

    pip install git+https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla-ansible@stable/2024.2

  2. Create the /etc/kolla directory.

    sudo mkdir -p /etc/kolla
sudo chown $USER:$USER /etc/kolla

  3. Copy globals.yml and passwords.yml to /etc/kolla directory.

    cp -r /path/to/venv/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla/* /etc/kolla

  4. Copy all-in-one inventory file to the current directory.

    cp /path/to/venv/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/all-in-one .

Install Ansible Galaxy requirements

Install Ansible Galaxy dependencies:

kolla-ansible install-deps

Prepare initial configuration

Inventory

The next step is to prepare our inventory file. An inventory is an Ansible file where we specify hosts and the groups that they belong to. We can use this to define node roles and access credentials.

Kolla Ansible comes with all-in-one and multinode example inventory files. The difference between them is that the former is ready for deploying single node OpenStack on localhost. In this guide we will show the all-in-one installation.

Kolla passwords

Passwords used in our deployment are stored in /etc/kolla/passwords.yml file. All passwords are blank in this file and have to be filled either manually or by running random password generator:

kolla-genpwd

Kolla globals.yml

globals.yml is the main configuration file for Kolla Ansible and per default stored in /etc/kolla/globals.yml file. There are a few options that are required to deploy Kolla Ansible:

  • Image options

    User has to specify images that are going to be used for our deployment. In this guide Quay.io-provided, pre-built images are going to be used. To learn more about building mechanism, please refer Building Container Images.

    Kolla provides choice of several Linux distributions in containers:

    • CentOS Stream (centos)

    • Debian (debian)

    • Rocky (rocky)

    • Ubuntu (ubuntu)

    For newcomers, we recommend to use Rocky Linux 9 or Ubuntu 22.04.

    kolla_base_distro: "rocky"

  • AArch64 options

    Kolla provides images for both x86-64 and aarch64 architectures. They are not “multiarch” so users of aarch64 need to define “openstack_tag_suffix” setting:

    openstack_tag_suffix: "-aarch64"

    This way images built for aarch64 architecture will be used.

  • Networking

    Kolla Ansible requires a few networking options to be set. We need to set network interfaces used by OpenStack.

    First interface to set is “network_interface”. This is the default interface for multiple management-type networks.

    network_interface: "eth0"

    Second interface required is dedicated for Neutron external (or public) networks, can be vlan or flat, depends on how the networks are created. This interface should be active without IP address. If not, instances won’t be able to access to the external networks.

    neutron_external_interface: "eth1"

    To learn more about network configuration, refer Network overview.

    Next we need to provide floating IP for management traffic. This IP will be managed by keepalived to provide high availability, and should be set to be not used address in management network that is connected to our network_interface. If you use an existing OpenStack installation for your deployment, make sure the IP is allowed in the configuration of your VM.

    kolla_internal_vip_address: "10.1.0.250"

  • Enable additional services

    By default Kolla Ansible provides a bare compute kit, however it does provide support for a vast selection of additional services. To enable them, set enable_* to “yes”.

    Kolla now supports many OpenStack services, there is a list of available services. For more information about service configuration, Please refer to the Services Reference Guide.

  • Multiple globals files

    For a more granular control, enabling any option from the main globals.yml file can now be done using multiple yml files. Simply, create a directory called globals.d under /etc/kolla/ and place all the relevant *.yml files in there. The kolla-ansible script will, automatically, add all of them as arguments to the ansible-playbook command.

    An example use case for this would be if an operator wants to enable cinder and all its options, at a later stage than the initial deployment, without tampering with the existing globals.yml file. That can be achieved, using a separate cinder.yml file, placed under the /etc/kolla/globals.d/ directory and adding all the relevant options in there.

  • Virtual environment

    It is recommended to use a virtual environment to execute tasks on the remote hosts. This is covered Virtual Environments.

Deployment

After configuration is set, we can proceed to the deployment phase. First we need to setup basic host-level dependencies, like docker.

Kolla Ansible provides a playbook that will install all required services in the correct versions.

The following assumes the use of the all-in-one inventory. If using a different inventory, such as multinode, replace the -i argument accordingly.

  1. Bootstrap servers with kolla deploy dependencies:

    kolla-ansible -i ./all-in-one bootstrap-servers

  2. Do pre-deployment checks for hosts:

    kolla-ansible -i ./all-in-one prechecks

  3. Finally proceed to actual OpenStack deployment:

    kolla-ansible -i ./all-in-one deploy

When this playbook finishes, OpenStack should be up, running and functional! If error occurs during execution, refer to troubleshooting guide.

Using OpenStack

  1. Install the OpenStack CLI client:

    pip install python-openstackclient -c https://releases.openstack.org/constraints/upper/2024.2

  2. OpenStack requires a clouds.yaml file where credentials for the admin user are set. To generate this file:

    kolla-ansible post-deploy

    Note

    The file will be generated in /etc/kolla/clouds.yaml, you can use it by copying it to /etc/openstack or ~/.config/openstack, or by setting the OS_CLIENT_CONFIG_FILE environment variable.

  3. Depending on how you installed Kolla Ansible, there is a script that will create example networks, images, and so on.

    Warning

    You are free to use the following init-runonce script for demo purposes but note it does not have to be run in order to use your cloud. Depending on your customisations, it may not work, or it may conflict with the resources you want to create. You have been warned.

    /path/to/venv/share/kolla-ansible/init-runonce