Running OpenStack under VirtualBox

This page has been superseded by Running OpenStack under VirtualBox – A Complete Guide.

(There’s still some good things on here though)

Running OpenStack under VirtualBox is detailed on many pages on the internet.  The Wiki at OpenStack.org has an intro on getting this going and why you would want to do this.  One big reason is that getting this great cloud software running under virtual hardware means you can set up multi-node clusters without a big outlay in hardware. This allows you to develop your cloud environment under the safety and convenience of your own machine.

The steps below are a mixture of instructions from http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/bleeding-edge-openstack-nova-on-maverick/ and http://wiki.openstack.org/NovaInstall/.

What you will be setting up

• VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/
• Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) http://www.ubuntu.com/
• OpenStack from Developer’s trunk (Bleeding edge code)

Instructions

1. Install VirtualBox
2. Create a Ubuntu 64 Guest
   • 1vCPU
   • 1024Mb Ram
   • 8Gb Disk
   • Enable Hardware VT-x/AMD-V if available
   • Add in an extra NIC, Host-only Adapter
3. Once installed, run the updates (and optionally install the Guest Additions if you’re running the desktop version) and reboot.
4. Assign a static IP to your eth1 interface (Host-only) – you will use this to access the guest from your host.
5. To install OpenStack follow the instructions http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/bleeding-edge-openstack-nova-on-maverick/

Warning for nested virtualization

Since you are running virtualization software under virtualization software (nested virtualization) some words of warning:

Intel VT-x: KVM does NOT currently support nested virtualization

To run instances under OpenStack under VirtualBox, you must specify that software emulation be used

sudo apt-get install qemu

Edit /etc/nova/nova.conf to enable qemu (software virtualization) support

--libvirt_type=qemu

AMD-V: Enable nested KVM virtualization support

To enable AMD’s KVM support create a file /etc/modprobe.d/kvm_amd.conf with the following in

options kvm_amd nested=1

And restart all the OpenStack services

service libvirt-bin restart; service nova-network restart; service  nova-compute restart; service nova-api restart; service nova-objectstore  restart; service nova-scheduler restart

Known Issues

Currently, at the time of writing, there is a bug in some of the Python scripts used to launch instances that may cause the following error to be thrown: KeyError: ‘imageId’ when creating instance with EC2/S3. A patch is available.

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/64364074/x.patch -O /tmp/KeyError_imageId.patch
cd /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6
sudo patch -p0 < /tmp/KeyError_imageId.patch
service libvirt-bin restart; service nova-network restart; service   nova-compute restart; service nova-api restart; service nova-objectstore   restart; service nova-scheduler restart

Tagged: amd-v, cloud, hvm, intel, openstack, running, ubuntu, virtualbox, virtualization, vt-x