Skip to main content

Create Windows stack using Heat Orchestration Template in Openstack

The blog explains the process of creating a basic Windows stack in Openstack using Heat Orchestration Template. The hypervisor being used is VMware ESXi5.5.

Image preparation to upload in glance

  • Lets start with creating a Windows 2012 R2 VM in ESXi. In this server, download and install the cloudbase-init package for windows .The beta version is available at this link:

https://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/CloudbaseInitSetup_Beta.msi


Follow the steps in this link for installation : http://www.cloudbase.it/cloud-init-for-windows-instances/

  • Once installation is completed, edit the 'setup.exe" registry key at HKLocal machine/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion and change the value from 1 to 3. This is to avoid a system restart exception when the image boots up for the first time in openstack
  • If you want to do any custom configurations in the windows machine, like open a specific firewall port, enable ping ,rdp etc..you can do it at this point
  •  Run Syprep and shutdown the VM
 C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /oobe /shutdown

  • Use a VMware standalone convertor ,select the prepared VM as source and convert it to a VM suitable for Vmware workstation 10.0.x. When the conversion process is completed, you will get a vmdk and .vmx file at the destination
  • Using winscp or any other similar tools, copy the converted vmdk to your openstack glance  server. 
  • Create an image from this vmdk using the following command

glance image-create --name <image name>--disk-format=vmdk --container-format=bare --is-public=true --property vmware_disktype="sparse" --property vmware_adaptertype="ide" --property vmware_ostype="windows8Server64Guest" < Openstack_win2012.vmdk


Sample yaml template

The template given below uses heat orchestrator to spin up an instance with the image that we created and install IIS in it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
heat_template_version: 2013-05-23

description: >
  Basic windows+IIS installation

parameters:

  key_name:
    type: string
    description : Name of a KeyPair to enable access to the instance
  instance_type:
    type: string
    description: Instance type for Windows server
    default: m1.small
    constraints:
      - allowed_values: [m1.small, m1.medium, m1.large]
        description: instance_type must be one of m1.small, m1.medium or m1.large
  image_id:
    type: string
    description: ID of the image to use for the Windows erver
    default:
  windows_feature:
   type: string
   description: windows feature to be installed

resources:
  windows_instance:
    type: OS::Nova::Server
    properties:
      image: { get_param: image_id }
      flavor: { get_param: instance_type }
      key_name: { get_param: key_name }
      user_data:
        str_replace:
          template: |
            #ps1

            Install-WindowsFeature -Name feature -IncludeManagementTools
          params:
            feature: { get_param: windows_feature }


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 Get password of the instance

Once the instance is up and running, you can use the keypair used while spinning up the stack to retrieve the password. In your openstance machine, run the following command

nova get-password <instance-id> <private key>

instance - id: This is the Id of instance created by the stack , can be obtained from horizon dashboard
privaye key : This is the pem file you downloaded while creating the keypair. Please note that you should copy it over to openstack machine using winscp before running the get-password command



 
Reference: 

The VMware specific configuration options for creating glance image
  http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/config-reference/content/vmware.html
 
The Vmware_ostype derived from the enumerator VirtualMachineGuestOsIdentifier in the API reference: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc%2Fvim.vm.GuestOsDescriptor.GuestOsIdentifier.html
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows server 2012: where is my start button??

If you have been using Windows Server OS for a while, the one thing that will strike you most when you login to a Windows server 2012 is that there is no start button!!.. What??..How am I going to manage it?? Microsoft feels that you really dont need a start button, since you can do almost everything from your server  manager or even remotely from your desktop. After all the initial configurations are done, you could also do away with the GUI and go back to server core option.(In server 2012, there is an option to add and remove GUI). So does that mean, you need to learn to live without a start button. Actually no, the start button is very much there .Lets start looking for it. Option 1: There is "charms" bar on the side of your deskop, where you will find a "start" option. You can use the "Windows +C" shortcut to pop out the charms bar Option 2: There is a hidden "start area"in  the bottom left corner of your desktop
3 comments
Read more

Install nested KVM in VMware ESXi 5.1

In this blog, I will explain the steps required to run a nested KVM hypervisor on  Vmware ESXi. The installation of KVM is done on Ubuntu 13.10(64 bit). Note: It is assumed that you have already installed your Ubuntu 13.10 VM in ESXi, and hence we will not look into the Ubuntu installation part. 1) Upgrade VM Hardware version to 9. In my ESXi server, the default VM hardware version was 8. So I had to shutdown my VM and upgrade the Hardware version to 9 to get the KVM hypervisor working. You can right click the VM and select the Upgrade hardware option to do this. 2)In the ESXi host In /etc/vmware edit the 'config' file and add the following setting vhv.enable = "TRUE" 3)Edit the VM settings and go to VM settings > Options  > CPU/MMU Virtualization . Select the Intel EPT option 4) Go to Options->CPUID mask> Advanced-> Level 1, add the following CPU mask level ECX  ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --H- ---- 5) Open the vmx
5 comments
Read more

Virtual fibre channel in Hyper V

Virtual fibre channel option in Hyper V allows the connection to pass through from physical  fibre channel HBA to virtual fibre channel HBA, and still have the flexibilities like live migration. Pre-requisites: VM should be running Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Supported physical HBA with N_Port Virtualization(NPIV) enabled in the HBA. This can be enabled using any management utility provided by the SAN manufacturer. If you need to enable live migration, each host should be having two physical HBAs and each HBA should have two World Wide Names(WWN). WWN is used to established connectivity to FC storage.When you perform migration, the second node can use the second WWN to connect to the storage and then the first node can release its connection. Thereby the storage connectivity is maintained during live migration Configuring virtual fibre channel is a two step process Step 1: Create a Virtual SAN in the Hyper-V host First you need to click on Virtual
2 comments
Read more