Advanced Configuration

Endpoint Network Configuration

When an OpenStack cloud is deployed, each services’ REST API is presented as a series of endpoints. These endpoints are the admin URL, the internal URL, and the external URL.

Kolla offers two options for assigning these endpoints to network addresses. These are combined and separate. For the combined option, all three endpoints share the same IP address. For the separate option, the external URL is assigned to an IP address that is different than the IP address shared by the internal and admin URLs.

The configuration parameters related to these options are:
  • kolla_internal_vip_address
  • network_interface
  • kolla_external_vip_address
  • kolla_external_vip_interface

For the combined option, set the two variables below, while allowing the other two to accept their default values. In this configuration all REST API requests, internal and external, will flow over the same network.

kolla_internal_vip_address: "10.10.10.254"
network_interface: "eth0"

For the separate option, set these four variables. In this configuration the internal and external REST API requests can flow over separate networks.

kolla_internal_vip_address: "10.10.10.254"
network_interface: "eth0"
kolla_external_vip_address: "10.10.20.254"
kolla_external_vip_interface: "eth1"

Fully Qualified Domain Name Configuration

When addressing a server on the internet, it is more common to use a name, like www.example.net, instead of an address like 10.10.10.254. If you prefer to use names to address the endpoints in your kolla deployment use the variables:

  • kolla_internal_fqdn
  • kolla_external_fqdn
kolla_internal_fqdn: inside.mykolla.example.net
kolla_external_fqdn: mykolla.example.net

Provisions must be taken outside of kolla for these names to map to the configured IP addresses. Using a DNS server or the /etc/hosts file are two ways to create this mapping.

TLS Configuration

An additional endpoint configuration option is to enable or disable TLS protection for the external VIP. TLS allows a client to authenticate the OpenStack service endpoint and allows for encryption of the requests and responses.

Note

The kolla_internal_vip_address and kolla_external_vip_address must be different to enable TLS on the external network.

The configuration variables that control TLS networking are:

  • kolla_enable_tls_external
  • kolla_external_fqdn_cert

The default for TLS is disabled; to enable TLS networking:

kolla_enable_tls_external: "yes"
kolla_external_fqdn_cert: "{{ node_config_directory }}/certificates/mycert.pem"

Note

TLS authentication is based on certificates that have been signed by trusted Certificate Authorities. Examples of commercial CAs are Comodo, Symantec, GoDaddy, and GlobalSign. Letsencrypt.org is a CA that will provide trusted certificates at no charge. Many company’s IT departments will provide certificates within that company’s domain. If using a trusted CA is not possible for your situation, you can use OpenSSL to create your own or see the section below about kolla generated self-signed certificates.

Two certificate files are required to use TLS securely with authentication. These two files will be provided by your Certificate Authority. These two files are the server certificate with private key and the CA certificate with any intermediate certificates. The server certificate needs to be installed with the kolla deployment and is configured with the kolla_external_fqdn_cert parameter. If the server certificate provided is not already trusted by the client, then the CA certificate file will need to be distributed to the client.

When using TLS to connect to a public endpoint, an OpenStack client will have settings similar to this:

export OS_PROJECT_DOMAIN_ID=default
export OS_USER_DOMAIN_ID=default
export OS_PROJECT_NAME=demo
export OS_USERNAME=demo
export OS_PASSWORD=demo-password
export OS_AUTH_URL=https://mykolla.example.net:5000
# os_cacert is optional for trusted certificates
export OS_CACERT=/etc/pki/mykolla-cacert.crt
export OS_IDENTITY_API_VERSION=3

Self-Signed Certificates

Note

Self-signed certificates should never be used in production.

It is not always practical to get a certificate signed by a well-known trust CA, for example a development or internal test kolla deployment. In these cases it can be useful to have a self-signed certificate to use.

For convenience, the kolla-ansible command will generate the necessary certificate files based on the information in the globals.yml configuration file:

kolla-ansible certificates

The files haproxy.pem and haproxy-ca.pem will be generated and stored in the /etc/kolla/certificates/ directory.

OpenStack Service Configuration in Kolla

Note

As of now kolla only supports config overrides for ini based configs. An operator can change the location where custom config files are read from by editing /etc/kolla/globals.yml and adding the following line.

# The directory to merge custom config files the kolla's config files
node_custom_config: "/etc/kolla/config"

Kolla allows the operator to override configuration of services. Kolla will look for a file in /etc/kolla/config/<< service name >>/<< config file >>. This can be done per-project, per-service or per-service-on-specified-host. For example to override scheduler_max_attempts in nova scheduler, the operator needs to create /etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-scheduler.conf with content:

[DEFAULT]
scheduler_max_attempts = 100

If the operator wants to configure compute node ram allocation ratio on host myhost, the operator needs to create file /etc/kolla/config/nova/myhost/nova.conf with content:

[DEFAULT]
ram_allocation_ratio = 5.0

The operator can make these changes after services were already deployed by using following command:

kolla-ansible reconfigure

IP Address Constrained Environments

If a development environment doesn’t have a free IP address available for VIP configuration, the host’s IP address may be used here by disabling HAProxy by adding:

enable_haproxy: "no"

Note this method is not recommended and generally not tested by the Kolla community, but included since sometimes a free IP is not available in a testing environment.

External Elasticsearch/Kibana environment

It is possible to use an external Elasticsearch/Kibana environment. To do this first disable the deployment of the central logging.

enable_central_logging: "no"

Now you can use the parameter elasticsearch_address to configure the address of the external Elasticsearch environment.

Non-default <service> port

It is sometimes required to use a different than default port for service(s) in Kolla. It is possible with setting <service>_port in globals.yml file. For example:

database_port: 3307

As <service>_port value is saved in different services’ configurationso it’s advised to make above change before deploying.