Deploying OpenStack

Uploading Images

Before we can launch instances, we need to upload a virtual disk image into Nova. There are a number of different images that you can use with your Nova installation. You can also make your own images.

For the purposes of our test server setup, let’s use Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud images. We’ll download the newest Ubuntu Server image for use on our cloud.

# wget \
>http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/natty/release/\
>ubuntu-11.04-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz

Once we have that image, we need to upload it into the Nova image store. How we do this varies depending on the image store that we’ve chosen. For our StackOps installation (which uses the nova-objectstore), we can use the uec-publish-tarball utility. To use this utility, give it the compressed image and container/bucket name (I’ve used images as my bucket name for this example).

# uec-publish-tarball ubuntu-11.04-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz images
Mon Jul  4 13:25:19 PDT 2011: ====== extracting image ======
Warning: no ramdisk found, assuming '--ramdisk none'
kernel : natty-server-uec-amd64-vmlinuz-virtual
ramdisk: none
image  : natty-server-uec-amd64.img
Mon Jul  4 13:25:32 PDT 2011: ====== bundle/upload kernel ======
Mon Jul  4 13:25:34 PDT 2011: ====== bundle/upload image ======
Mon Jul  4 13:26:46 PDT 2011: ====== done ======
emi="ami-6683ba18"; eri="none"; eki="aki-7eea4179";

The emi="ami-6683ba18” part is what we are interested in. It is the machine image. We’ll use it later when we launch an instance. ...