Development Environment with Vagrant

This guide describes how to use Vagrant to assist in developing for Kolla.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. Vagrant takes care of setting up CentOS-based VMs for Kolla development, each with proper hardware like memory amount and number of network interfaces.

Getting Started

The Vagrant script implements all-in-one or multi-node deployments. all-in-one is the default.

In the case of multi-node deployment, the Vagrant setup builds a cluster with the following nodes by default:

  • 3 control nodes

  • 1 compute node

  • 1 storage node (Note: ceph requires at least 3 storage nodes)

  • 1 network node

  • 1 operator node

The cluster node count can be changed by editing the Vagrantfile.

Kolla runs from the operator node to deploy OpenStack.

All nodes are connected with each other on the secondary NIC. The primary NIC is behind a NAT interface for connecting with the Internet. The third NIC is connected without IP configuration to a public bridge interface. This may be used for Neutron/Nova to connect to instances.

Start by downloading and installing the Vagrant package for the distro of choice. Various downloads can be found at the Vagrant downloads.

Install required dependencies as follows:

For CentOS or RHEL 8:

sudo dnf install ruby-devel libvirt-devel zlib-devel libpng-devel gcc \
qemu-kvm qemu-img libvirt python3-libvirt libvirt-client virt-install git

For Ubuntu 16.04 or later:

sudo apt install vagrant ruby-dev ruby-libvirt python-libvirt \
qemu-utils qemu-kvm libvirt-dev nfs-kernel-server zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev \
gcc git

Note

Many distros ship outdated versions of Vagrant by default. When in doubt, always install the latest from the downloads page above.

Next install the hostmanager plugin so all hosts are recorded in /etc/hosts (inside each vm):

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager

Vagrant supports a wide range of virtualization technologies. If VirtualBox is used, the vbguest plugin will be required to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the virtual machine:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

This documentation focuses on libvirt specifics. To install vagrant-libvirt plugin:

vagrant plugin install --plugin-version ">= 0.0.31" vagrant-libvirt

Some Linux distributions offer vagrant-libvirt packages, but the version they provide tends to be too old to run Kolla. A version of >= 0.0.31 is required.

To use libvirt from Vagrant with a low privileges user without being asked for a password, add the user to the libvirt group:

sudo gpasswd -a ${USER} libvirt
newgrp libvirt

Note

In Ubuntu 16.04 and later, libvirtd group is used.

Setup NFS to permit file sharing between host and VMs. Contrary to the rsync method, NFS allows both way synchronization and offers much better performance than VirtualBox shared folders. For CentOS:

  1. Add the virtual interfaces to the internal zone:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=internal --add-interface=virbr0
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=internal --add-interface=virbr1
  1. Enable nfs, rpc-bind and mountd services for firewalld:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=internal --add-service=nfs
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=internal --add-service=rpc-bind
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=internal --add-service=mountd
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=internal --add-port=2049/udp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=2049/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=111/udp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=111/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Note

You may not have to do this because Ubuntu uses Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) and ufw is disabled by default.

  1. Start required services for NFS:

sudo systemctl restart firewalld
sudo systemctl start nfs-server
sudo systemctl start rpcbind.service

Ensure your system has libvirt and associated software installed and setup correctly. For CentOS:

sudo systemctl start libvirtd
sudo systemctl enable libvirtd

Find a location in the system’s home directory and checkout Kolla repos:

git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla-cli
git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla-ansible
git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla

All repos must share the same parent directory so the bootstrap code can locate them.

Developers can now tweak the Vagrantfile or bring up the default all-in-one CentOS 7-based environment:

cd kolla-ansible/contrib/dev/vagrant && vagrant up

The command vagrant status provides a quick overview of the VMs composing the environment.

Vagrant Up

Once Vagrant has completed deploying all nodes, the next step is to launch Kolla. First, connect with the operator node:

vagrant ssh operator

To speed things up, there is a local registry running on the operator. All nodes are configured so they can use this insecure repo to pull from, and use it as a mirror. Ansible may use this registry to pull images from.

All nodes have a local folder shared between the group and the hypervisor, and a folder shared between all nodes and the hypervisor. This mapping is lost after reboots, so make sure to use the command vagrant reload <node> when reboots are required. Having this shared folder provides a method to supply a different Docker binary to the cluster. The shared folder is also used to store the docker-registry files, so they are save from destructive operations like vagrant destroy.

Building images

Once logged on the operator VM call the kolla-build utility:

kolla-build

kolla-build accept arguments as documented in Building Container Images. It builds Docker images and pushes them to the local registry if the push option is enabled (in Vagrant this is the default behaviour).

Generating passwords

Before proceeding with the deployment you must generate the service passwords:

kolla-genpwd

Deploying OpenStack with Kolla

To deploy all-in-one:

sudo kolla-ansible deploy

To deploy multinode:

Ensure that the nodes deployed by Vagrant match those specified in the inventory file: /usr/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/multinode.

For Centos 7:

sudo kolla-ansible deploy -i /usr/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/multinode

For Ubuntu 16.04 or later:

sudo kolla-ansible deploy -i /usr/local/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/multinode

Validate OpenStack is operational:

kolla-ansible post-deploy
export OS_CLIENT_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/kolla/clouds.yaml
export OS_CLOUD=kolla-admin
openstack user list

Or navigate to http://172.28.128.254/ with a web browser.

Further Reading

All Vagrant documentation can be found at Vagrant documentation.