I decided to try Openstack a look and see what it was all about and maybe pick up a few things about it. I went to the Openstack site and poked around a little bit and saw that there was a local dev environment available for download that you could standup as a single node and have something to play with. you can find that HERE at DevStack.
At first glance the install and setup looked pretty easy. Run as yourself, follow the prompts, wait a few minutes and there you go. Not so for me…I made it through the prompts and while i was waiting i was reading down through the instructions and looking for the URL of the dashboard you use to command this thing. I found this:
“At this point you should be able to access the dashboard.”
Where??? Whats not said here is that at the end of the stack.sh script you will be given this information based on your own setup and computer’s IP address. i didn’t figure this out until the very end though.
Centos Experience
My experience with DevStack on Centos was not a good one. My VM met all of the requirements and then some and there were no firewalls enabled. The speed of “setup” was the same VS on Ubuntu but the results were very different. On the first run there were issues trying to download some dependencies. Once that was fixed I then kept seeing errors like this at the end of the stack.sh script run…
2013-11-05 09:23:41 + service_check 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + local service 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + local failures 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + SCREEN_NAME=stack 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + SERVICE_DIR=/opt/stack/status 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + [[ ! -d /opt/stack/status/stack ]] 2013-11-05 09:23:41 ++ ls /opt/stack/status/stack/horizon.failure /opt/stack/status/stack/n-api.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + failures='/opt/stack/status/stack/horizon.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:41 /opt/stack/status/stack/n-api.failure' 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + for service in '$failures' 2013-11-05 09:23:41 ++ basename /opt/stack/status/stack/horizon.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:41 + service=horizon.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + service=horizon 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + echo 'Error: Service horizon is not running' 2013-11-05 09:23:42 Error: Service horizon is not running 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + for service in '$failures' 2013-11-05 09:23:42 ++ basename /opt/stack/status/stack/n-api.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + service=n-api.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + service=n-api 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + echo 'Error: Service n-api is not running' 2013-11-05 09:23:42 Error: Service n-api is not running 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + '[' -n '/opt/stack/status/stack/horizon.failure 2013-11-05 09:23:42 /opt/stack/status/stack/n-api.failure' ']' 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + echo 'More details about the above errors can be found with screen, with ./rejoin-stack.sh' 2013-11-05 09:23:42 More details about the above errors can be found with screen, with ./rejoin-stack.sh 2013-11-05 09:23:42 + set +o xtrace 2013-11-05 09:23:42 stack.sh completed in 1185 seconds.
From here i tried hitting the dashboard to see what i would get and i finally did get something…more errors. From the dashboard url at 192.1681.1.151:5000/v2.0 I got an error that says that the XML had no style.
<version id="v2.0" status="stable" updated="2013-03-06T00:00:00Z" xmlns="http://docs.openstack.org/identity/api/v2.0"> <media-types> <media-type base="application/json" type="application/vnd.openstack.identity-v2.0+json"> <media-type base="application/xml" type="application/vnd.openstack.identity-v2.0+xml"> </media-type></media-type></media-types> <links> <link href="http://192.168.1.151:5000/v2.0/" rel="self"/> <link href="http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-identity-service/2.0/content/" rel="describedby" type="text/html"/> <link href="http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-identity-service/2.0/identity-dev-guide-2.0.pdf" rel="describedby" type="application/pdf"/> </links> <link href="http://192.168.1.151:5000/v2.0/" rel="self"/> <link href="http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-identity-service/2.0/content/" rel="describedby" type="text/html"/> <link href="http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-identity-service/2.0/identity-dev-guide-2.0.pdf" rel="describedby" type="application/pdf"/> </version>
Ubuntu Experience
Once I saw this i decided to give this a try on Ubuntu. Not my flavor of choice but wanted to see if i got the same results. I spun up a new VM in virtualbox using ubuntu server 12.04, ran the update, installed Git, and then cloned down the devstack repo. On the very first run of stack.sh I got a successful install and something i had not seen before…
Horizon is now available at http://192.168.1.152/ Keystone is serving at http://192.168.1.152:5000/v2.0/ Examples on using novaclient command line is in exercise.sh The default users are: admin and demo The password: ******** This is your host ip: 192.168.1.152 stack.sh completed in 1255 seconds.
Right off the bat Im liking this. The dashboard isnt cluttered and is easy to read. Never using something like this, I had an instance and volume attached within 3 minutes of just poking around. Id say this is pretty cool and easy for someone to pick up and learn. im going to keep playing around with it for a while and see what all i can come up with to do. It looks like there are some exercises to run though so Ill be checking that out also soon.
