In an OpenStack environment, cloud-init generally fetches information from the metadata service provided by Nova. It also has support for reading this information from a configuration drive, which under OpenStack means a virtual CD-ROM device attached to your instance containing the same information that would normally be available via the metadata service.

It is possible to generate your network configuration from this configuration drive, rather than relying on the DHCP server provided by your OpenStack environment. In order to do this you will need to make the following changes to your Nova configuration:

  1. You must be using a subnet that does have a DHCP server. This means that you have created it using neutron subnet-create --disable-dhcp ..., or that you disabled DHCP on an existing network using neutron net-update --disable-dhcp ....

  2. You must set flat_inject to true in /etc/nova/nova.conf. This causes Nova to embed network configuration information in the meta-data embedded on the configuration drive.

  3. You must ensure that injected_network_template in /etc/nova/nova.conf points to an appropriately formatted template.

Cloud-init expects the network configuration information to be presented in the format of a Debian /etc/network/interfaces file, even if you’re using it on RHEL (or a derivative). The template is rendered using the Jinja2 template engine, and receives a top-level key called interfaces that contains a list of dictionaries, one for each interface.

A template similar to the following ought to be sufficient:

{% for interface in interfaces %}
auto {{ interface.name }}
iface {{ interface.name }} inet static
  address {{ interface.address }}
  netmask {{ interface.netmask }}
  broadcast {{ interface.broadcast }}
  gateway {{ interface.gateway }}
  dns-nameservers {{ interface.dns }}
{% endfor %}

This will directly populate /etc/network/interfaces on an Ubuntu system, or will get translated into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 on a RHEL system (a RHEL environment can only configure a single network interface using this mechanism).