OpenStack Cloud Quick Start

Welcome

This page overviews the platform and provides a starting point with utilizing the IaaS portion.
It is intended to provide instruction to get a cloud instance up and running within minutes.

Objectives

Logging into OpenStack with FedAuth
Importing a Public SSH Key
Selecting an Operating System and Flavor Size
Security Group Overview
Accessing the Instance
Quick Networking Overview, Attaching a Private or Public Floating IP on the UCB Science Network
Additional Resources

Video

Quick Start (6:58)

Text Reference

Text Guide

Login to the platform via the CU Boulder Federated Identity Service at https://cloud.cs.colorado.edu
If not already in the project named "Community Project (Shared)", switch to it from top left of the web interface.

Other project memberships are determined by your federation claims.
All active Employees will be added to this demo project "Community Project (Shared)"

* Students must be part of a project managed by a Faculty or Staff member in order to spin up instances.
If logging in for the first time, navigate to Project > Compute > Key Pairs

If you do not have an existing Key, you can generate a new one in Apple Terminal or Windows PowerShell
```
$ ssh-keygen
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
```
Click "Import Public Key" and populate with the following fields:
Key Pair Name: <IdentiKey>
Key Type: SSH Key
Public Key: <Your Public SSH Key>

Click "Import Public Key" to Import
Boot a new Instance

Navigate to Project > Compute > Instances > Launch Instance

Details Section:
Instance Name: <Desired Instance Name, ie "canvas-quickstart">
Description: <Desired Description, ie "Adam's Demo Instance">
Availability Zone: ucb-east-1a (For more information on availability zones, visit this page)
Count: 1

Source Section:
Select Boot Source: Image
Delete Volume in Instance Delete: Yes (manually cleanup if this is set to no)
Volume Size: <Leave at default, will be set by flavor>
Allocated: <Select any Linux Operating System, RHEL8 is used in the video>

Flavor Section:
Allocated: <Select a flavor> (For more information on flavors, visit this page)

Networks Section:
Select "projectnet3116-private (scinet-internal-attachable)" if attaching an internal campus IP is desired.
Select "projectnet3148-private (scinet-external-attachable)" if attaching a public IP is desired.

Note: This project (Community Project) is atypical, that it has multiple private project networks with routers connected to multiple external networks for demo purposes. For security reasons these are segregated. Do not attempt to bridge these networks or otherwise modify anything with the OpenStack SDN defined for this project.

Security Groups Section:
Select desired ports to open in the OpenStack Firewall
In this case, select "ssh-restricted" and "icmp-restricted"
The "restricted" postfix in this case means that the ports are only open from the CU Boulder VPN, and certain campus networks.
Groups without this postfix allow ingress from anywhere. (ie https)

Note: Please do not add, remove, or otherwise modify any security groups in the community project.

Key Pair Section:
Allocated: <Your SSH Public Key> (Should already by allocated)

Configuration Section:
Customization Script: Optionally add shell script to run on first-boot. This will be passed to cloud-init and will only ever run once.
Useful for example to register a RHEL host:
```
#!/bin/bash
subscription-manager register --activationkey=<Key> --org=<Org>
subscription-manager attach --pool=<Pool>
```
CU Boulder Provides a RHEL Site License, so these values <Key>, <Org>, and <Pool> can be found from OIT here.

Click "Launch Instance"
Allocate a Floating IP

Under "Actions" on the instance row, click the dropdown and select "Associate Floating IP"
If there are no IP addresses available, click the "+" button.

Depending on your private network selection earlier, select either the "scinet-external" or "scinet-internal" pool and then click "Allocate IP"
Once an IP has been taken from the pool, click "Associate" to attach it to the instance.
SSH into the instance

The default cloud username will vary based on the maintainer. For example Red Hat uses "cloud-user", Ubuntu uses "ubuntu".
Visit this page for default usernames of the other cloud images.

All addresses in the OpenStack Floating IP Pool have a default A record in Campus DNS.
Perform a reverse lookup to retrieve the address. ITP's can visit IPAM.
```
$ dig -x 198.59.7.65

;; ANSWER SECTION:
65.7.59.198.in-addr.arpa. 3600    IN    PTR    cu-sn-spsc-cspub1-7-65.colorado.edu.
```
In the above example, the address is cu-sn-spsc-cspub1-7-65.colorado.edu
If something else is desired, either send a request to NEO (help@colorado.edu) or CSCI (help@cs.colorado.edu)
Additional Volumes and Retyping

Another common operation is adding additional storage, this can be found under Project > Volumes > Volumes
Here, all volumes in the project can be viewed. To create a new, empty volume click "Create Volume"

Volume Name: <Can be whatever, ie <IdentiKey>'s additional volume>
Description: <Some description on what is stored in the volume>
Volume Source: No source, empty volume
Type: ceph-st1 (For more information on volume types, click here)
Size (GiB): 32GiB

By default, all volumes are created with type "ceph-st1 (magnetic)"
This can be changed by clicking the dropdown under "Actions" > "Type" with Migration Policy "On Demand"

For example, changing the volume type from "ceph-st1" to "ceph-gp2" will copy the volume from the magnetic backed pool to ssds.
Cleanup

Since this is a shared community project, please be courteous to other users and cleanup resources no longer used

- Terminate Instances (Project > Compute > Instances)
- Delete Volumes (Project > Volumes > Volumes)
- Release Floating IP's (Project > Network > Floating IP's)

Notes

The Community project is a demo area for users to evaluate on. Any instance started here can be viewed by any active IdentiKey user. As such do not start any instance of value in this project. Request a private project for long term needs. Memberships would be managed with the OIT Enterprise Access Management Service (Grouper).

If a private project is desired, return to the Computing Resources page and click "Request a Private Project" in the OpenStack section.

Additional Resources

Thank you for visiting the quick start. Additional manuals can be found in Course Modules - OpenStack.

Return to Course Modules - OpenStack

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