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prerequisites.md

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Prerequisites

Here's the checklist; click on each item for more details:

Please do not rely on conference or hotel wifi to download these files!

Hardware requirements

  • x86_64 machine with hardware virtualization capability (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) enabled in the BIOS, and at least ~16GB spare disk and 3GB RAM, but:
    • You should have at least 16GB RAM for building a full HA cloud.
    • If you only have 8GB and want to build a two-node HA cluster for the control plane then you will not have enough RAM for a compute node in order to provision a VM instance in the cloud. However this is still plenty interesting enough to be worth attempting!
    • If you have 6GB you could opt for a single controller node in a non-HA configuration.
    • If you only have 3 or 4GB, you will be able to run the Crowbar admin node via vagrant up admin but nothing else. This is not very useful but at least lets you poke around the Crowbar UI.
  • If using the KVM hypervisor, the capability to do nested virtualization will greatly aid performance of instances booted via OpenStack Compute (Nova).

Software requirements

Hypervisor

You will need one of the following hypervisors installed:

  • VirtualBox >= 4.3.0 (but the latest release is strongly recommended), or
  • KVM

Here are some points to bear in mind when choosing a hypervisor:

  • KVM is only available on Linux, so if you're on a Mac or Windows, you have to use VirtualBox.
  • Vagrant has native support for VirtualBox, which therefore tends to be slightly more robust than using the vagrant-libvirt plugin.
  • KVM requires the vagrant-libvirt plugin, which has a somewhat tricky installation process.
  • VirtualBox doesn't support nested virtualization. so OpenStack Compute nodes will need to use the QEMU software hypervisor instead, which will be quite a bit slower.
  • KVM can harness Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM) for more efficient use of RAM, sharing memory pages not only between Vagrant (i.e. Crowbar) VMs, but also between cloud instances booted via OpenStack Compute (nova).
  • Some kernel developers are critical of the quality of the VirtualBox kernel modules.

So if you're in a hurry, go with VirtualBox. However if you have the time and patience, and definitely want to run multiple VM instances inside your cloud, maybe KVM is the better route.

Installing VirtualBox

On SUSE systems, it is recommended to install from the OBS Virtualization project. The simplest way to do this is probably via 1-click install:

  • Visit http://software.opensuse.org/package/virtualbox
  • Select "Show other versions"
  • Select "Show unstable packages"
  • Select "1 Click Install" at the end of the Virtualization line
  • Download and open the resulting .ymp file, and follow the instructions.

For other OSs, you can download from virtualbox.org.

On Linux systems:

  • Once installed, make sure that the VirtualBox kernel modules are loaded and that the services (vboxdrv) were started.
  • Make sure that the user account you are going to use for running VirtualBox and Vagrant (non-root recommended) has been added to the vboxusers group.
  • Make sure that your command shell already has access to the vboxusers group. You can check by running the groups command; vboxusers should be included in the output. If not, either run newgrp vboxusers or log out and in again.

(The build.sh scripts in the pre-canned demos automatically check all this for you.)

Installing KVM

For KVM, you will need libvirt and various associated packages installed. On openSUSE, do:

zypper install -t pattern kvm_server

For other distros, refer to your distro's documentation.

Vagrant

You will need Vagrant >= 1.6.5 installed. For all OSs the upstream packages should work fine.

If on openSUSE, you can alternatively install from OBS although you may well encounter issues, especially relating to installation of plugins, and you will not be able to use the vagrant-login (Vagrant Cloud) and vagrant-share plugins.

Vagrant libvirt provider

If using libvirt, please also see vagrant-libvirt.md.

Vagrant boxes

You will need two boxes, which are fairly big downloads:

  • suse/cloud4-admin (~2.4GB)
  • suse/sles11sp3 (~550MB)

They are available from Vagrant Cloud by typing the following in the same user account from which you will use them:

vagrant box add suse/cloud4-admin
vagrant box add suse/sles11sp3

Adding boxes from the local filesystem

Alternatively if you already have the .box and accompanying .json files downloaded, you can add them directly as follows.

IMPORTANT: make sure you do these steps as the same user with which you are going to run Vagrant!

Note that you need to be in the directory containing the downloaded boxes:

# Adjust path as necessary:
cd ~/Downloads

# If you are using virtualbox (adjust filename appropriately):
vagrant box add cloud4-admin.x86_64-0.1.6.virtualbox-Build1.1.json

# or if you are using libvirt:
vagrant box add cloud4-admin.x86_64-0.1.6.libvirt-Build1.1.json

and similarly for the sles11sp3 box.

Updating an existing box

Please see https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/boxes/versioning.html

CAUTION! If you are using vagrant-libvirt, there is a known pitfall with updating boxes; please see this caveat.

git repository

You will need a copy of this git repository downloaded. If you have git installed, do:

git clone https://github.com/SUSE-Cloud/suse-cloud-vagrant.git
cd suse-cloud-vagrant/

Alternatively you can simply download a .zip. However on Windows it is strongly recommended that you install git for Windows because this will:

  1. allow you to run the build.sh scripts provided with the pre-canned demos from within Git BASH, and
  2. provide you with a working ssh client (see below).

N.B. On openSUSE, ensure that you have the ca-certificates-mozilla package installed for successful cloning from github:

zypper install ca-certificates-mozilla

ssh

ssh is required in order to allow vagrant ssh to work. On Linux and MacOS X this is installed by default, but on Windows you will need to install it. This can be done by installing git for Windows and then running vagrant from within Git BASH.