Cloud OS

Openstack and Hyper-V integration

Openstack and Hyper-V integration
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CONTENTS
...................................................................................................................................................................... 1
What is Openstack? ...................................................................................................................................... 3
Get Started .................................................................................................................................................... 3
Hyper-V Nova Compute Installer ................................................................................................................ 4
Relevant Commands and Information ...................................................................................................... 10
References .................................................................................................................................................. 11




Openstack and Hyper-V integration
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Deploying Openstack on Hyper-V

WHAT IS OPENSTACK?
The Openstack cloud operating system enables enterprises and service providers to offer on-
demand computing resources, by provisioning and managing large networks of virtual
machines. Compute resources are accessible via APIs for developers building cloud
applications and via web interfaces for administrators and users. The compute architecture is
designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware, enabling the cloud economics companies
have come to expect.
Popular Use Cases
Service providers offering an IaaS compute platform or services higher up the stack
IT departments acting as cloud service providers for business units and project teams
Processing big data with tools like Hadoop
Scaling compute up and down to meet demand for web resources and applications
High-performance computing (HPC) environments processing diverse and intensive
workloads

GET STARTED
One of the goals was being able to install and configure Nova compute on Hyper-V (Hyper-V
Server or Windows server) in the simplest possible way, using a nice and tidy GUI for the
occasional deployment or an automated and unattended mode for deployments on a massive
number of servers.
To begin, all it needs is an installation of the Microsoft free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 or 2012 or
as an alternative Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 with the Hyper-V role enabled.
A suggestion is using the free Hyper-V Server edition instead of Windows Server for a few
reasons
1. It runs a very limited subset of the Windows Server operating system, which means that
it has a lower impact on security updates and management
2. Theres no difference in features or performance compared to the full Windows Server

Openstack and Hyper-V integration
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If you want to see how Hyper-V works with Openstack but you dont have a server or PC on
which to install it, well you can even run it on top of another hypervisor (for test purposes only,
this is of course TOTALLY unsupported). As an example, you can run it in a VM on top of
VMWare Workstation 9, Fusion 5 or ESXi 5.
HYPER-V NOVA COMPUTE INSTALLER
We are going to install on Hyper-V only the Openstack Compute role, so you will need to run
the other required roles on separate hosts or VMs. If you do not plan to deploy it in a
production environment, I suggest you to create an Ubuntu Server 12.04 VM in Hyper-V or
elsewhere with a DevStack deployment.
Once your Hyper-V setup is done, you can download the installer to a folder on the server and
run it on Hyper-V / Windows Server 2012 R2 or you can even download and run it directly from
a PowerShell prompt as the example bellow:

$src = http://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi
$dest = $env:temp\HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi
Invoke-WebRequest -uri $src -OutFile $dest
Unblock-File $dest
Start-Process $dest

Openstack does not have an official support to Hyper-V, to download the installer pack its
necessary consult the open source community to get resources as the website:
http://www.cloudbase.it/openstack/openstack-compute-installer


Openstack and Hyper-V integration
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Here is how the welcome screen look like:


After accepting the license agreement the features selection will appear:


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Openstack Nova Compute is the core feature of the package. It installs a dedicated Python
environment, all required dependencies and a Windows service called nova-compute. By
clicking on Browse, it is possible to change the installation folder.

Live Migration is available on 2012 but not in 2008 R2, requires the host to be a member of a
domain. This feature enables and configures Hyper-V shared nothing live migration. Besides
KVM, Hyper-V is the only Openstack hypervisor supporting it, with the additional advantage
that thanks to this installer it is unbelievably easy to setup.

iSCSI Initiator Service enables and starts the Microsoft iSCSI initiator service, required for Cinder
volume management.

Openstack Command Prompt creates an Openstack command prompt shortcut. This is
especially useful on Windows Server or on a workstation in order to have a ready-made
environment with the PATH and other environment variables properly set.

FreeRDP for Hyper-V is an amazing cross platform open source RDP client that works also with
the Hyper-V RDP extensions required to connect to VM consoles. To more information, follow
the link.

The next steps are required to handle the service configurations and are displayed in function
of the selected features.


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Nova compute requires one bridge (virtual switch in Hyper-V terms), which can be
automatically created by the installer.


The basic configuration consists in providing the settings for the glance server address,
RabbitMQ server address, Nova database and the path where the Nova compute driver will
save the Hyper-V instances and Glance images.


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Limit CPU features is required when live migration is used between servers with different CPU
architectures. When Use CoW Images is enabled, the Nova compute driver creates
differencing disks based on the glance VHD images, instead of copying the entire image for
each spawned instance. This leads to massively shorter instance deployment times.


Live migration can be configured here without having to use Microsoft Hyper-V Manager or
PowerShell. All you have to do is to choose the authentication type (a suggestion, Kerberos),
the maximum number of parallel live migrations, and IP limitations if needed. Please note also
that live migration requires that the Nova Compute service runs with domain credentials. The
selected domain user will be automatically added to the local administrators group.


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During this step files are copied, services and components get registered, the nova.conf file is
written and finally the nova-compute service is started.



Once the setup is finished, you can always start it again to change / add / remove any feature.



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RELEVANT COMMANDS AND INFORMATION

Restart the compute service:
net stop nova-compute && net start nova-compute
Restart the iSCSI initiator service:
net stop msiscsi && net start msiscsi
Log the installer activity:
msiexec /i HyperVNovaCompute_Folsom.msi /l*v log.txt
Uninstall this package if does not have the MSI file:
msiexec /uninstall {792BADAA-8FE0-473C-BAD7-CAFA2AFF4F2D}


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REFERENCES

http://devstack.org/
http://www.openstack.org/software/start/
http://www.cloudbase.it/cloud-init-for-windows-instances/