OpenStack Operations Guide

Chapter 10. User-Facing Operations

This guide is for OpenStack operators and does not seek to be an exhaustive reference for users, but as an operator, you should have a basic understanding of how to use the cloud facilities. This chapter looks at OpenStack from a basic user perspective, which helps you understand your users’ needs and determine, when you get a trouble ticket, whether it is a user issue or a service issue. The main concepts covered are images, flavors, security groups, block storage, and instances.

Images

OpenStack images can often be thought of as “virtual machine templates.” Images can also be standard installation media such as ISO images. Essentially, they contain bootable file systems that are used to launch instances.

Adding Images

Several premade images exist and can easily be imported into the Image Service. A common image to add is the CirrOS image, which is very small and used for testing purposes. To add this image, simply do:

$ wget http://download.cirros-cloud.net/0.3.1/cirros-0.3.1-x86_64-disk.img
$ glance image-create --name='cirros image' --is-public=true \
  --container-format=bare --disk-format=qcow2 < cirros-0.3.1-x86_64-disk.img

The glance image-create command provides a large set of options for working with your image. For example, the min-disk option is useful for images that require root disks of a certain size (for example, large Windows images). To view these options, do:

$ glance help image-create

The location option is important to note. It does ...