I regularly use OpenStack on my laptop with libvirt as my hypervisor. I was interested in experimenting with recent versions of the nova-docker driver, but I didn’t have a spare system available on which to run the driver, and I use my regular nova-compute service often enough that I didn’t want to simply disable it temporarily in favor of nova-docker. NB As pointed out by gustavo in the comments, running two neutron-openvswitch-agents on the same host – as suggested in this article – is going to lead to nothing but sadness and doom.

One of the new features available in the Juno release of OpenStack is support for serial console access to your Nova servers. This post looks into how to configure the serial console feature and then how to access the serial consoles of your Nova servers. Configuring serial console support In previous release of OpenStack, read-only access to the serial console of your servers was available through the os-getConsoleOutput server action (exposed via nova console-log on the command line).

Setting the stage I ran into a problem earlier this week deploying RDO Icehouse under RHEL 6. My target systems were a set of libvirt guests deployed from the RHEL 6 KVM guest image, which includes cloud-init in order to support automatic configuration in cloud environments. I take advantage of this when using libvirt by attaching a configuration drive so that I can pass in ssh keys and a user-data script.

While experimenting with Fedora Atomic, I was looking for an elegant way to automatically deploy Atomic into an OpenStack environment and then automatically schedule some Docker containers on the Atomic host. This post describes my solution. Like many other cloud-targeted distributions, Fedora Atomic runs cloud-init when the system boots. We can take advantage of this to configure the system at first boot by providing a user-data blob to Nova when we boot the instance.

If you want to build a Windows image for use in your OpenStack environment, you can follow the example in the official documentation, or you can grab a Windows 2012r2 evaluation pre-built image from the nice folks at CloudBase. The CloudBase-provided image is built using a set of scripts and configuration files that CloudBase has made available on GitHub. The CloudBase repository is an excellent source of information, but I wanted to understand the process myself.