Quick Start

This guide provides step by step instructions to deploy OpenStack using Kolla Ansible on bare metal servers or virtual machines.

Recommended reading

It’s beneficial to learn basics of both Ansible and Docker before running Kolla-Ansible.

Host machine requirements

The host machine must satisfy the following minimum requirements:

• 2 network interfaces

• 8GB main memory

• 40GB disk space

See the support matrix for details of supported host Operating Systems.

Install dependencies

Typically commands that use the system package manager in this section must be run with root privileges.

It is generally recommended to use a virtual environment to install Kolla Ansible and its dependencies, to avoid conflicts with the system site packages. Note that this is independent from the use of a virtual environment for remote execution, which is described in Virtual Environments.

1. For Ubuntu, update the package index.

   sudo apt-get update
   

2. Install Python build dependencies:

   For CentOS or RHEL 7, run:

   sudo yum install python-devel libffi-devel gcc openssl-devel libselinux-python
   

   For CentOS or RHEL 8, run:

   sudo dnf install python3-devel libffi-devel gcc openssl-devel python3-libselinux
   

   For Ubuntu, run:

   sudo apt-get install python-dev libffi-dev gcc libssl-dev python-selinux python-setuptools
   

Install dependencies using a virtual environment

If not installing Kolla Ansible in a virtual environment, skip this section.

1. Install the virtualenv package.

   For CentOS or RHEL 7, run:

   sudo yum install python-virtualenv
   

   For CentOS or RHEL 8, run:

   sudo dnf install python3-virtualenv
   

   For Ubuntu, run:

   sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
   

2. Create a virtual environment and activate it:

   virtualenv /path/to/virtualenv
   source /path/to/virtualenv/bin/activate
   

   The virtual environment should be activated before running any commands that depend on packages installed in it.

3. Ensure the latest version of pip and setuptools are installed:

   pip install -U pip
   pip install -U setuptools
   

4. Install Ansible. Currently, Kolla Ansible requires Ansible 2.6 to 2.9.

   pip install 'ansible<2.10'
   

Install dependencies not using a virtual environment

If installing Kolla Ansible in a virtual environment, skip this section.

1. Install pip.

   For CentOS or RHEL, run:

   sudo easy_install pip
   

   For Ubuntu, run:

   sudo apt-get install python-pip
   

2. Ensure the latest version of pip and setuptools are installed:

   sudo pip install -U pip
   sudo pip install -U setuptools
   

3. Install Ansible. Currently, Kolla Ansible requires Ansible 2.6 to 2.9.

   For CentOS or RHEL, run:

   sudo yum install ansible
   

   For Ubuntu, run:

   sudo apt-get install ansible
   

4. If the version of Ansible provided by the distribution does not meet the above version requirements, install it via pip.

   sudo pip install 'ansible<2.10'
   

Install Kolla-ansible

Install Kolla-ansible for deployment or evaluation

1. Install kolla-ansible and its dependencies using pip.

   If using a virtual environment:

   pip install kolla-ansible
   

   If not using a virtual environment:

   sudo pip install kolla-ansible
   

2. Create the /etc/kolla directory.

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/kolla
   sudo chown $USER:$USER /etc/kolla
   

3. Copy globals.yml and passwords.yml to /etc/kolla directory.

   If using a virtual environment:

   cp -r /path/to/virtualenv/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla/* /etc/kolla
   

   If not using a virtual environment on CentOS or RHEL, run:

   cp -r /usr/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla/* /etc/kolla
   

   If not using a virtual environment on Ubuntu, run:

   cp -r /usr/local/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla/* /etc/kolla
   

4. Copy all-in-one and multinode inventory files to the current directory.

   If using a virtual environment:

   cp /path/to/virtualenv/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/* .
   

   If not using a virtual environment on CentOS or RHEL, run:

   cp /usr/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/* .
   

   If not using a virtual environment on Ubuntu, run:

   cp /usr/local/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/* .
   

Install Kolla for development

1. Clone kolla and kolla-ansible repositories from git.

   git clone https://github.com/openstack/kolla
   git clone https://github.com/openstack/kolla-ansible
   

2. Install requirements of kolla and kolla-ansible:

   If using a virtual environment:

   pip install ./kolla
   pip install ./kolla-ansible
   

   If not using a virtual environment:

   sudo pip install ./kolla
   sudo pip install ./kolla-ansible
   

3. Create the /etc/kolla directory.

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/kolla
   sudo chown $USER:$USER /etc/kolla
   

4. Copy the configuration files to /etc/kolla directory. kolla-ansible holds the configuration files ( globals.yml and passwords.yml) in etc/kolla.

   cp -r kolla-ansible/etc/kolla/* /etc/kolla
   

5. Copy the inventory files to the current directory. kolla-ansible holds inventory files ( all-in-one and multinode) in the ansible/inventory directory.

   cp kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/* .
   

Configure Ansible

For best results, Ansible configuration should be tuned for your environment. For example, add the following options to the Ansible configuration file /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
host_key_checking=False
pipelining=True
forks=100

Further information on tuning Ansible is available here.

Prepare initial configuration

Inventory

The next step is to prepare our inventory file. An inventory is an Ansible file where we specify hosts and the groups that they belong to. We can use this to define node roles and access credentials.

Kolla-Ansible comes with all-in-one and multinode example inventory files. The difference between them is that the former is ready for deploying single node OpenStack on localhost. If you need to use separate host or more than one node, edit multinode inventory:

1. Edit the first section of multinode with connection details of your environment, for example:

   [control]
   10.0.0.[10:12] ansible_user=ubuntu ansible_password=foobar ansible_become=true
   # Ansible supports syntax like [10:12] - that means 10, 11 and 12.
   # Become clause means "use sudo".
   
   [network:children]
   control
   # when you specify group_name:children, it will use contents of group specified.
   
   [compute]
   10.0.0.[13:14] ansible_user=ubuntu ansible_password=foobar ansible_become=true
   
   [monitoring]
   10.0.0.10
   # This group is for monitoring node.
   # Fill it with one of the controllers' IP address or some others.
   
   [storage:children]
   compute
   
   [deployment]
   localhost       ansible_connection=local become=true
   # use localhost and sudo
   

   To learn more about inventory files, check Ansible documentation.

2. Check whether the configuration of inventory is correct or not, run:

   ansible -i multinode all -m ping
   

   Note

   Ubuntu might not come with python pre-installed. That will cause errors in ping module. To quickly install python with ansible you can run ansible -i multinode all -m raw -a "apt-get -y install python-dev"

Kolla passwords

Passwords used in our deployment are stored in /etc/kolla/passwords.yml file. All passwords are blank in this file and have to be filled either manually or by running random password generator:

For deployment or evaluation, run:

kolla-genpwd

For development, run:

cd kolla-ansible/tools
./generate_passwords.py

Kolla globals.yml

globals.yml is the main configuration file for Kolla-Ansible. There are a few options that are required to deploy Kolla-Ansible:

• Image options

  User has to specify images that are going to be used for our deployment. In this guide DockerHub provided pre-built images are going to be used. To learn more about building mechanism, please refer Building Container Images.

  Kolla provides choice of several Linux distributions in containers:

  • CentOS

  • Ubuntu

  • Debian

  • RHEL

  For newcomers, we recommend to use CentOS 7, CentOS 8 or Ubuntu 18.04.

  kolla_base_distro: "centos"
  

  You can also use CentOS Stream 8 - it’s recommended for new installations because CentOS Linux 8 was supported only until 31st Dec 2021.

  By default Kolla-Ansible will use -centos8s openstack_tag_suffix on CentOS Stream 8 hosts, to override that behaviour please set openstack_tag_suffix to an empty/different value.

  openstack_tag_suffix: ""
  

  Next “type” of installation needs to be configured. Choices are:

  binary

  using repositories like apt or yum

  source

  using raw source archives, git repositories or local source directory

  Note

  This only affects OpenStack services. Infrastructure services like Ceph are always “binary”.

  Note

  Source builds are proven to be slightly more reliable than binary.

  kolla_install_type: "source"
  

• Networking

  Kolla-Ansible requires a few networking options to be set. We need to set network interfaces used by OpenStack.

  First interface to set is “network_interface”. This is the default interface for multiple management-type networks.

  network_interface: "eth0"
  

  Second interface required is dedicated for Neutron external (or public) networks, can be vlan or flat, depends on how the networks are created. This interface should be active without IP address. If not, instances won’t be able to access to the external networks.

  neutron_external_interface: "eth1"
  

  To learn more about network configuration, refer Network overview.

  Next we need to provide floating IP for management traffic. This IP will be managed by keepalived to provide high availability, and should be set to be not used address in management network that is connected to our network_interface.

  kolla_internal_vip_address: "10.1.0.250"
  

• Enable additional services

  By default Kolla-Ansible provides a bare compute kit, however it does provide support for a vast selection of additional services. To enable them, set enable_* to “yes”. For example, to enable Block Storage service:

  enable_cinder: "yes"
  

  Kolla now supports many OpenStack services, there is a list of available services. For more information about service configuration, Please refer to the Services Reference Guide.

• Virtual environment

  It is recommended to use a virtual environment to execute tasks on the remote hosts. This is covered Virtual Environments.

Deployment

After configuration is set, we can proceed to the deployment phase. First we need to setup basic host-level dependencies, like docker.

Kolla-Ansible provides a playbook that will install all required services in the correct versions.

The following assumes the use of the multinode inventory. If using a different inventory, such as all-in-one, replace the -i argument accordingly.

• For deployment or evaluation, run:

  1. Bootstrap servers with kolla deploy dependencies:

     kolla-ansible -i ./multinode bootstrap-servers
     

  2. Do pre-deployment checks for hosts:

     kolla-ansible -i ./multinode prechecks
     

  3. Finally proceed to actual OpenStack deployment:

     kolla-ansible -i ./multinode deploy
     

• For development, run:

  1. Bootstrap servers with kolla deploy dependencies:

     cd kolla-ansible/tools
     ./kolla-ansible -i ../../multinode bootstrap-servers
     

  2. Do pre-deployment checks for hosts:

     ./kolla-ansible -i ../../multinode prechecks
     

  3. Finally proceed to actual OpenStack deployment:

     ./kolla-ansible -i ../../multinode deploy
     

When this playbook finishes, OpenStack should be up, running and functional! If error occurs during execution, refer to troubleshooting guide.

Using OpenStack

1. Install the OpenStack CLI client:

   pip install python-openstackclient
   

2. OpenStack requires an openrc file where credentials for admin user are set. To generate this file:

   • For deployment or evaluation, run:

     kolla-ansible post-deploy
     . /etc/kolla/admin-openrc.sh
     

   • For development, run:

     cd kolla-ansible/tools
     ./kolla-ansible post-deploy
     . /etc/kolla/admin-openrc.sh
     

3. Depending on how you installed Kolla-Ansible, there is a script that will create example networks, images, and so on.

   • For deployment or evaluation, run init-runonce script on CentOS or RHEL:

     /usr/share/kolla-ansible/init-runonce
     

     Run init-runonce script on Ubuntu:

     /usr/local/share/kolla-ansible/init-runonce
     

   • For development, run:

     kolla-ansible/tools/init-runonce