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How to Quickly Get Started with VMware vSphere & OpenStack?

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Kenneth Hui recently published a number of interesting articles diving into the latest VMware vSphere integration with the OpenStack Grizzly release called OpenStack For VMware Admins: Nova Compute With vSphere Part1 and Part2. There has definitely been a lot of chatter around OpenStack lately and I agree with Kenneth, there is also a lot of confusion around the topic in general. Although I have not used OpenStack personally, one very important concept to understand is that OpenStack is really just a framework that allows you to build a Cloud solution that is comprised of the best of breed products that can then be plugged into the underlying compute, network, storage and management infrastructure.

One example of this is OpenStack's Nova compute component which supports a variety of Hypervisor solutions including KVM, XEN and now also VMware vSphere. Another example is OpenStack's Neutron (formally Quantum) networking component which also supports a variety of networking platforms including the leader in this space which is VMware's Nicira NVP (Networking Virtualization Platform).

Having said all that, since I have never worked with OpenStack before, I thought this would be a great opportunity to give OpenStack a test run with my vSphere home lab environment. With a quick Google search, I found an OpenStack Wiki guide for setting up VMware's Nova integration and I thought I should be able to just follow that. As it turns out, some of the commands no longer function due to some recent code changes in OpenStack and the instructions were also incomplete for a few steps. With the assistance of the OpenStack development team at VMware, I was able to get everything working and I wanted to share the details while the Wiki gets corrected.

Here is a diagram of what a vSphere and OpenStack solution could look like and we will be primarily focusing on the Nova component:

Pre-requesites:

  • vSphere ready environment with vCenter Server and at least one ESXi host (I recommend using the vCenter Server Appliance for quick setup)
  • vanilla installation of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (you can find more details here)

Here is what my vSphere inventory looks like and the nice about this is you can use an existing vSphere environment. As you can see I have my Apple Mac Mini running ESXi, which is also hosting my vCenter Server along with my OpenStack virtual machine.

Installation:

Step 1 - Install git and we will be using that to clone out the latest DevStack which is basically a huge shell script that helps you quickly stand up an OpenStack instance for testing/development as it is not a trivial task to install OpenStack. Run the following commands on your Ubuntu OpenStack host:

sudo apt-get -y install git
git clone http://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
cd devstack

Step 2 - Next we will need to setup a Tun/Tap interface which can do userspace networking and this helps ensure we do not mess with our primary interface (eth0) that is used to connect to the OpenStack VM. Run the following commands:

sudo ip tuntap add dev tapfoo mode tap
sudo ifconfig tapfoo 172.30.0.1 up

Note: You can select any IP Address that is not being used, I chose 172.30.0.1

To confirm the software interface was created correctly, you can run the ifconfig command and you should see a "tapfoo" interface with the IP Address that you had specified from above.

Step 3 - Now we need to create a file called localrc in the devstack directory with the following configurations listed below which will be used by DevStack to build and configure our OpenStack instance.

ENABLED_SERVICES=g-api,g-reg,key,n-api,n-crt,n-cpu,n-net,n-cond,n-sch,rabbit,mysql,horizon
VIRT_DRIVER=vsphere
VMWAREAPI_IP=192.168.1.127
VMWAREAPI_USER=root
VMWAREAPI_PASSWORD=vmware
VMWAREAPI_CLUSTER=Cluster
DATABASE_PASSWORD=nova
RABBIT_PASSWORD=nova
SERVICE_TOKEN=nova
SERVICE_PASSWORD=nova
ADMIN_PASSWORD=nova
FLAT_INTERFACE=tapfoo
HOST_IP=192.168.1.143
SCREEN_LOGDIR=/home/primp/devstack-logs
SYSLOG=True
SYSLOG_HOST=192.168.1.104
SYSLOG_PORT=514

The configurations in BLACK are required, where as the ones in GREEN are optional and I will explain those in a bit.

VMWAREAPI_IP is the IP Address of your vCenter Server
VMWAREAPI_PASSWORD is the password of your vCenter Server
VMWAREAPI_CLUSTER is the name of the vSphere Cluster if you have one, else you can leave it blank
HOST_IP is the IP Address of your OpenStack Ubuntu host

Optional configurations:

SCREEN_LOGDIR will log all the OpenStack logs to a directory of your choice. By default, DevStack will log to standard out and only visible through the Screen sessions of each component which is not very user friendly nor easy for troubleshooting.

If you wish to forward OpenStack logs to a remote syslog host, you can also enable the following three configurations which should be pretty straight forward:

SYSLOG=True
SYSLOG_HOST is the IP Address of your remote syslog host (more details on this towards the bottom)
SYSLOG_PORT is the port of your remote syslog host, default will be 514

Note: If you want to learn about other DevStack localrc options, take a look a the documentation here

Step 4 - We are now ready to build and deploy our OpenStack instance. To start, just run the following command:

./stack.sh

This process will take a few minutes depending on how fast your system is and the connection to download all the necessary packages. If everything was successful, you should see a summary about logging into your OpenStack instance and the URL for the Horizon UI as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 5 - Go ahead and confirm you can access the Horizon UI by opening up a browser and pointing it to the IP Address of your OpenStack instance.

Step 6 - To start using OpenStack, we will need to first upload a virtual machine disk to OpenStack's Glance component which handles VM images. There is a sample Debian VMDK that is available on the OpenStack Wiki that we will be downloading to our OpenStack instance. To do so, we will set our credentials on the command-line for the next step and perform a wget to download the VMDK by running the following commands:

source openrc demo demo
wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/utvri5bw3zztty6/Debian-flat.vmdk

Step 7 - We will now use the following Glance CLI to upload our virtual disk and we can also list it once it is uploaded:

glance image-create --name Debian --is-public=True --container-format=bare --disk-format=vmdk --property vmware-disktype="preallocated" < Debian-flat.vmdk
glance image-list

Step 8 - To deploy a new instance of the image we have just uploaded, we will switch over to the Nova CLI and specify the Image ID from the previous step and run the following command which will deploy to our vSphere environment.

nova boot --image --flavor 1 my-first-openstack-vm
nova list

Step 9 - We can continue to run "nova list" to view the status, but it would be more interesting to see this from the Horizon UI. You can head over to the OpenStack UI and see the progress under the Instances tab.
Once the VM is ready, we should see an IP Address assignment and the status set to ready and the VM should show powered on.
To confirm that we have actually provisioned the VM onto our vSphere compute cluster, we can login to either the vSphere Web Client or vSphere C# Client and we should see our newly deployed VM running.
If you wish to deploy using the Horizon UI, you can go to Project -> Instances -> Launch Instance and go through the wizard selecting the image, specifying a name and configuration flavor and then click on Launch once you are ready to deploy.
Step 10 - Once you are finished, you can run the ./unstack.sh command which will reset and clean up your environment and delete any images that were uploaded. Again, DevStack is not meant for running production workloads, but can be used for quickly testing or developing against OpenStack. You can also view the consoles of each of the OpenStack components by using screen -x stack.
Using DevStack, you can quickly get a basic OpenStack instance up and running without too much hassle but this is not to say that OpenStack is easy or trivial to install. If this is your first time, I would highly recommend configuring your localrc to store the logs in a directory so you can either go through them if you run into any issues or more likely forward it over to an OpenStack expert to help you decipher. I personally had ran into a few issues and it was partially due to some errors in the Wiki, but troubleshooting can be like search for a needle in a haystack.

DevStack Syslog Configuration

If you recall earlier in the localrc configuration, there is a section that specifies remote syslog configurations for the OpenStack instance. Since I am a fan of the new vCenter Log Insight product that was just released as a beta from VMware, I thought it would be neat to forward the OpenStack logs to it. After a bit of trial and error, it turns out that DevStack configures rsyslog (which is the syslog daemon) running on the Ubuntu host to forward logs using RELP format which is not supported by vCenter Log Insight. If you want to get this working, you will need to disable RELP format by tweaking the rsyslog configuration in /etc/rsyslog.d/90-stack-s.conf
You will need to replace :omrelp:

*.*             :omrelp:192.168.1.104:514

to just @@:

*.*             @@192.168.1.104:514

Finally, you need to restart the rsyslog service for the changes to take effect by running the following command:

service rsyslog restart

If we login to our vCenter Log Insight UI, we should now see our OpenStack instance logging remotely. Once you unstack and run stack, the configurations will default back to the original.

Additional Resources:

Quick Tip - Listing Image Profiles From an ESXi Patch Using ESXCLI

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I was cleaning out a few of my to-do items (list just keeps getting longer everyday) this morning and there was a question that I received a few weeks back asking how to retrieve the list of Image Profiles for a given ESXi patch. This is actually quite easy and you will want to use ESXCLI.

Note: The examples shown below is using ESXCLI on the ESXi Shell, but these commands can be execute remotely as well using ESXCLI or through PowerCLI with Get-EsxCli cmdlet.

To list the available Image Profiles for an ESXi patch, run the following command (ensure you substitute the full path to your ESXi patch):

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip

To get more details on a particular Image Profile, run the following command and specify the -p for the specific Image Profile:

esxcli software sources profile get -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip -p ESXi-5.1.0-20121204001-no-tools

To install/update a specific Image Profile, run the following command with the Image Profile name:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip -p ESXi-5.1.0-20121204001-no-tools

If you just want to install the ESXi patch, run the following command which will install the esx-base Image Profile by default which will include everything:

esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip

To check for the Image Profile you have installed on your ESXi host, run the following command:

esxcli software profile get

Here are some additional resources for ESXi patch management that may also be useful:

Forwarding Logs From The vCloud Suite To vCenter Log Insight

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An exciting new product was just announced last week by VMware called vCenter Log Insight, which will be part of the vCenter Operations Management Suite when released. The announcement also includes a public beta for customers to try out the new log analytics product that allows administrators to easily get an understanding of both their physical and virtual infrastructure through the collection of log data. You can get more details on how vCenter Log Insight works by checking out this article by the Jon Herlocker, who is in the Office of CTO and focusing on vCenter Log Insight.

I had known about vCenter Log Insight for quite sometime now and like others within VMware, I had the opportunity to test drive the product early on and provide feedback to the engineering team. One of neatest thing about vCenter Log Insight, in my opinion, is the simplistic setup and the tight integration between vCenter Server and vCenter Operations Manager. During the setup of vCenter Log Insight, I was reminded about an article that I had written about forwarding vCenter Server logs to a syslog server. I thought, would it not be cool if we could forward logs from other products within the vCloud Suite to vCenter Log Insight using the same syslog-ng trick? I decided to compile a list of logs from each of the products within the vCloud Suite shared that internally and thanks to my colleague Michael White who also help vet the list by circulating it within engineering.

I then decided to create a very simple script called configurevCloudSuiteSyslog.sh that would allow users to easily configure each of the vCloud Suite products to forward their appropriate logs to vCenter Log Insight. The script is very simple to use, you just need to scp the script to one of the supported appliances within the vCloud Suite and specify the VMware solution name and the IP Address of your vCenter Log Insight Server.

Here is an example of running the script on the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance):

Based on the VMware solution selected, the appropriate logs will be appended to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf to be forwarded off to your vCenter Log Insight Server. The syslog-ng client will automatically be restarted for the changes to go into effect as part of the script. In my environment, I have deployed the majority of products within the vCloud Suite installed and have configured each of them to forward their logs to vCenter Log Insight. This can be very useful from a troubleshooting perspective and being able to view and filter through all the relevant logs from a single location.

It was really interesting to see what the next "chattiest" VMware solution was from a log perspective in my environment, which turned out to be VIN after vCenter Server and ESXi host. I hope to see deeper integration between vCenter Log Insight and the rest of the vCloud Suite in future releases, but for now, if you have not tried out vCenter Log Insight, I would highly recommend you give it a try and provide any feedback you may have in the dedicated VMTN community forum.

If you are interested in the specifics logs that are being collected for each of VMware products, you can find the complete list below. Not all products from the vCloud Suite are listed here and some such as vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security provide native syslog configuration from the application standpoint which can be configured using either their UIs or APIs.

vCenter Operations Manager Analytics (VCOPS):

/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log 

vCenter Operations Manager UI (VCOPS):

/var/log/vmware/admin.log
/var/log/vmware/ciq-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/ciq.log
/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/lastupdate.log
/var/log/vmware/mod_jk.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.cmd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log
/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log 

vCenter Orchestrator (VCO):

/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/boot.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/console.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/server.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/script-logs.log
/opt/vmo/configuration/jetty/logs/jetty.log 

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA):

/var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd-alert.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vws.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vmware-vpxd.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/inventoryservice/ds.log 

vCloud Connector Node (VCC):

/opt/vmware/hcagent/logs/hca.log 

vCloud Connector Server (VCC):

/opt/vmware/hcserver/logs/hcs.log 

vSphere Data Protection (VDP):

/space/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log
/space/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log
/space/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.err.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/flush.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/avinstaller.log.0
/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-server.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-configure.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/flr/server_logs/flr-server.log
/data01/cur/err.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmMgr.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/MountMgr.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlrWs.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlr.log 

vCloud Director (VCD):

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-info.log
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/jmx.log 

vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN):

/var/log/vadm/system.log
/var/log/vadm/engine.log
/var/log/vadm/activecollector.log
/var/log/vadm/dbconfig.log
/var/log/vadm/db/postgresql.log 

vSphere Management Assistance (VMA):

/var/log/vmware/vma/vifpd.log 

vSphere Replication (VR):

/var/log/vmware/hbrsrv.log