ICO 2.5: Creating a Red Hat 6.5 image with Gnome for use with a VMWare vSphere cloud

Introduction

When creating your private OpenStack-managed vSphere cloud, you're going to need some "images" ("VM Templates" in VMWare terminology) so you can launch/deploy instances. The really sticky part about this configuration is that OpenStack has traditionally only supported the KVM hypervisor, which uses a different disk format than VMWare (KVM uses QCOW2 and VMWare uses VMDK). I found some great QCOW2 images here: http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/ch_obtaining_images.html and some great CentOS VMDK images here: http://osboxes.org. I had some different hurdles with each of those and finally decided just to install RHEL 6.5 from scratch, then modify that VM to work, then create a VM Template that would be automatically discovered by OpenStack as an image. In this post I'll cover the highlights of this technique.

Install Red Hat

Install the "Desktop" option. This will mean that you have to do a little cleanup later, but I'll cover that.

Install VMWare Tools

Go ahead and install VMWare tools just to make your life a little easier.

Configure Yum Repositories and Install Packages

If you're using Red Hat Subscription Manager, you don't have to go through these steps. If you're not using RHSN, you'll need to manually configure some repositories. I found for this exercise that the CentOS repositories, along with the EPEL repository, worked great. To configure the CentOS repositories, create a file named /etc/yum.repos.d/YOU_PICK_A_NAME.repo with the following contents:

[base]

name=CentOS-6 - Base

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=os

#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/

gpgcheck=0

#released updates

[updates]

name=CentOS-6 - Updates

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=updates

#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/updates/x86_64/

gpgcheck=0

#additional packages that may be useful

[extras]

name=CentOS-6 - Extras

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=extras

#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/extras/x86_64/

gpgcheck=0

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages

[centosplus]

name=CentOS-6 - Plus

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=centosplus

#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/centosplus/x86_64/

gpgcheck=0

enabled=0

#contrib - packages by Centos Users

[contrib]

name=CentOS-6 - Contrib

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=contrib

#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/contrib/x86_64/

gpgcheck=0

enabled=0

Then run 'yum repo-list' to verify the repositories were created. Now you can run the following commands:

yum -y epel-release

yum -y cloud-init

yum -y cloud-utils

yum -y heat-cfntools

Configure Networking

Since the "Desktop" option was chosen, the NetworkManager service was installed and enabled. You need to change that with these commands:

service NetworkManager stop

chkconfig NetworkManager off

service network start
chkconfig network

Now run the following commands so that eth0 will get configured properly:

sed -i '/^HWADDR/d' /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

echo -n > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

echo -n > /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules

Configure cloud.cfg

The default configuration will try to contact multiple non-existent IP addresses for metadata, and you don't need that by changing /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg. Add the following line to that file:

datastore_list: [ NoCloud, ConfigDrive, None ]

You *may* also want to set:

disable_root: 0

ssh_pwauth: 1

This will allow you to access the VM as root, and via ssh with a password.

Make a Template

Via the vSphere Web Client or vSphere Windows Client, clone the VM to a template. After you do this, wait a few minutes for OpenStack to "see" this new template as an Image.

Conclusion

Following the above steps should get you a working template from which you can explore the other capabilities of ICO and ICMWO.

How to reset your OpenStack services to "Up" in your IBM Cloud Manager dashboard for a vSphere cloud

While trying test and manage components in your vSphere cloud, you may see "Services Down" in some parts of the dashboard. For example, under "Host Aggregates":

I basically found that restarting all of the "nova*" services on my controller to be the answer to this problem.

The one-line answer is to log into your controller node as root and run the following:

for i in `systemctl -a | grep \.service | grep " active"| grep nova | awk '{ print $1 }'`; do systemctl restart $i;echo $i; done

So it's iterating through the results of the 'systemctl -a' command that contain active services containing the word "nova", and restarting each of those services. After you run the above, you should see that it shows "Services Up" for all availability zones on all hosts (since in a vSphere cloud, these services are all running on the controller node, rather than on the VMware nodes themselves).

There's a new cloud in town, Part 4 How to reset ICMWO 4.3 to reinstall a cloud

After making sure ICMWO (IBM Cloud Manager With OpenStack) had the correct fixpack installed, the installation and configuration of ICO 2.5 succeeded and is working fine. I'm able to deploy individual VMs and Heat stacks to an OpenStack cloud. I've only created a small vSphere cloud, and I believe that's the reason that I haven't had much success getting ICMWOS to work with that cloud (I can launch instances, but those instances can't see their operating system). But I've learned several useful pieces of information through the process. I'll list the most important one here, and I'll write a new post for each of the others.

How to "reset" ICMWO to reinstall a cloud

While you're kicking the tires (or even installing into a production environment), you will certainly encounter the need to try to re-deploy a cloud. This "reset" functionality isn't made available from the GUI, and really involves doing some things outside of ICMWO. Happily, ICMWO doesn't install anything on your vCenter or ESXi servers (the controller uses the appropriate vSphere APIs through the vCenter server to do all the dirty work). So, to reset things so you can re-deploy a vSphere cloud, you need to:

1. Delete and re-create the "controller" node that you previously specified. This is the server that ICMWO deployed OpenStack to. You created this server specifically for this purpose based on the topology requirements of ICMWO. My entire environment is running under VMWare Workstation, so I simply took a snapshot of this VM once I had the OS installed and configured, so I could revert to that snapshot before each successive attempt.

2. Next, you need to delete the TWO Chef resources associated with the controller. There is a NODE and a CLIENT that have been created for the controller. To delete those, you need to run the following two commands (where "vmc.mynet.foo" is the FQDN of the controller for your VMWare cloud):

knife client delete vmc.mynet.foo

knife node delete vmc.mynet.foo

3. Finally, to delete the cloud from ICMWO Deployer GUI (https://icmwos.mynet.foo:8443), you need to log into the ICMWO server (via the console, ssh, VNC, etc.) as the same user you use to log into the Deployer GUI and delete a directory. The name of the directory contains the name of the cloud that you specified in ICMWO when you deployed the cloud and the datetimestamp when it was created. The directory is under:

$HOME/icm/clouds

And the name will be "cloudName_datetimestamp". So to delete the cloud named "vc55" from my GUI, I needed to run this command:

rm -rf ~/icm/clouds/vc55_2015-09-29_173201

And now ICMWO is ready to allow you to try to deploy a cloud to that node. I don't know if this name is stored anywhere else, so the safest route in my opinion is to use a different name for the new cloud.