Home OpenStack-Ansible Installation Guide

Preparing the target hosts

The following section describes the installation and configuration of operating systems for the target hosts.

Installing the operating system

Install the Ubuntu Server 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) LTS 64-bit operating system on the target host. Configure at least one network interface to access the internet or suitable local repositories.

We recommend adding the Secure Shell (SSH) server packages to the installation on target hosts without local (console) access.

We also recommend setting your locale to en_US.UTF-8. Other locales may work, but they are not tested or supported.

Configuring the operating system

1. Upgrade system packages and kernel:

   # apt-get dist-upgrade
   

2. Ensure the kernel version is 3.13.0-34-generic or later.

3. Install additional software packages:

   # apt-get install bridge-utils debootstrap ifenslave ifenslave-2.6 \
     lsof lvm2 ntp ntpdate openssh-server sudo tcpdump vlan
   

4. Add the appropriate kernel modules to the /etc/modules file to enable VLAN and bond interfaces:

   # echo 'bonding' >> /etc/modules
   # echo '8021q' >> /etc/modules
   

5. Configure NTP to synchronize with a suitable time source.

6. Reboot the host to activate the changes and use new kernel.

Deploying SSH keys

Ansible uses SSH for connectivity between the deployment and target hosts.

1. Copy the contents of the public key file on the deployment host to the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file on each target host.
2. Test public key authentication from the deployment host to each target host. SSH provides a shell without asking for a password.

For more information on how to generate an SSH keypair as well as best practices, refer to GitHub’s documentation on generating SSH keys.

Warning

OpenStack-Ansible deployments expect the presence of a /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file on the deployment host. The contents of this file is inserted into an authorized_keys file for the containers, which is a necessary step for the Ansible playbooks. You can override this behavior by setting the lxc_container_ssh_key variable to the public key for the container.

Configuring LVM

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows a single device to be split into multiple logical volumes which appear as a physical storage device to the operating system. The Block Storage (cinder) service, as well as the LXC containers that run the OpenStack infrastructure, can optionally use LVM for their data storage.

Note

OpenStack-Ansible automatically configures LVM on the nodes, and overrides any existing LVM configuration. If you had a customized LVM configuration, edit the generated configuration file as needed.

1. To use the optional Block Storage (cinder) service, create an LVM volume group named cinder-volumes on the Block Storage host. A metadata size of 2048 must be specified during physical volume creation. For example:

   # pvcreate --metadatasize 2048 physical_volume_device_path
   # vgcreate cinder-volumes physical_volume_device_path
   

2. Optionally, create an LVM volume group named lxc for container file systems. If the lxc volume group does not exist, containers are automatically installed into the file system under /var/lib/lxc by default.

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