The controller node follows the same installation procedure that we have seen in the previous services. On the controller node, we will perform the following:

And after this, we will configure the system by following these steps:

As usual, let's create our checklist to ensure we have all the pre-requisites before hand:

mysql –u root –p

create database nova;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nova.* TO 'nova'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'n0vapwd';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nova.* TO 'nova'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'n0vapwd';

apt-get install nova-api nova-cert nova-consoleauth nova-novncproxy nova-scheduler python-novaclient nova-conductor

Initial configuration

Let's now look at the initial configuration steps you need to keep in mind.

Creating the Nova user in Keystone

We will create the user in Keystone using the following command; by now, you are familiar with exporting credentials in order to use the different OpenStack command-line utilities:

keystone user-create --name nova --pass n0vakeypwd

You should be able to see the following output:

We then add the user to the admin role by the following command:

keystone user-role-add --user nova --tenant service --role admin

Creating the Nova service in Keystone

The Nova service is created using the following command:

keystone service-create --name nova --type compute --description "OpenStack Compute"

The following screenshot demonstrates the output:

We will have to note the ID of the service, which we will use in the next section. In our case, this is 885fb274a5084daf92b09d378bab56a7.

Creating the Nova endpoint in Keystone

The endpoint is created using the following command; you have to replace the ID with the ID you got during your service creation:

keystone endpoint-create 
  --service-id 885fb274a5084daf92b09d378bab56a7
  --publicurl http://OSControllerNode:8774/v2/%(tenant_id)s 
  --internalurl http://OSControllerNode:8774/v2/%(tenant_id)s 
  --adminurl http://OSControllerNode:8774/v2/%(tenant_id)s 
  --region dataCenterOne

This will create the Nova endpoint in Keystone.

Modifying the configuration file

We will now be modifying a single configuration file, /etc/nova/nova.conf. The following changes are done to this file:

• In the [database] section, do the following:
  • We will set the database connection string in the file, as this:

    connection = mysql://nova:n0vapwd@OSControllerNode/nova

• In the [default] section, these changes are done:
  • Configure the Rabbit MQ access, as shown here:

    rpc_backend = rabbit

    rabbit_host = OSControllerNode

    rabbit_password = rabb1tmqpass

  • Set the authentication strategy to Keystone, as follows:

    auth_strategy = keystone

  • Set the management IP address:

    my_ip = 172.22.6.95

  • Set the VNC configuration:

    vncserver_listen = 172.22.6.95

    vncserver_proxyclient_address = 172.22.6.95

• In the [keystone_authtoken] section, do the following:
  • Set the Keystone configuration as:

    auth_uri = http://OSControllerNode:5000/v2.0

    identity_uri = http://OSControllerNode:35357

    admin_tenant_name = service

    admin_user = nova

    admin_password = n0vakeypwd

• In the [glance] section, do as follows:
  • Set the Glance Host:

    host = OSControllerNode

The file will look like the following screenshot:

Populating the database

We can populate the database using the following command (under root):

/bin/sh -c "nova-manage db sync" nova

Ensure that the database is created and we don't have any errors.

Tip

If there are any errors, please check the connection string that is mentioned in the nova.conf file and ensure that the MySQL instance is up.

Finalizing the installation

We will delete the SQLite database file and restart all the services by the following command:

rm -rf /var/lib/nova/nova.sqlite
service nova-api restart
service nova-cert restart
service nova-consoleauth restart
service nova-scheduler restart
service nova-conductor restart
service nova-novncproxy restart

If you have installed any other services such as html5 proxy, please restart them as well. This concludes the installation on the controller node.

The compute virtualization is so prevalent that all the hardware components, especially the CPUs, are virtualization-enabled, which in essence is the CPU being virtually split and supporting additional command sets that let the virtual machine manager control the CPUs more effectively and offer a better performance.

These flags are masked when we install a hypervisor on an already virtualized machine, hence hardware support is not present. This doesn't actually mean that you cannot do this, but just means that now the second-level guests will be a little slower in their performance, as they have to do this virtualization in software rather than in hardware.

It should also be noted that some virtualization platforms don't work when they are nested (as an example, KVM), and hence Qemu needs to be used. However, modern hypervisors such as VMware also allow these CPU flags to be passed down to the guest OS as well so that the guest can run a hypervisor if it so chooses. Since virtualization is beyond the purview of this book, we will park this topic for now.

On the compute node, we will install the hypervisor, which in our case is KVM. If you are also using, for example, VMware to run this node in a virtualized environment, you will have to expose the AT-V flags and hardware acceleration so that you can run KVM.

In order to test whether we can run KVM, execute the following command:

egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If this returns 1, which means that it can see the VT flags in the CPU and it will be able to use the CPU virtualization instruction set, in this case we are okay to proceed with KVM; otherwise, we have to use Qemu. Another way to test is to install the cpu-checker package and execute the kvm-ok command):

sudo apt-get install cpu-checker
kvm-ok

If the output is KVM acceleration can be used, we can go ahead and use KVM; otherwise, we have to use Qemu.

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-desktop

sudo apt-get install virt-manager

sudo apt-get install nova-compute sysfsutils

rm -rf /var/lib/nova/nova.sqlite
service nova-compute restart