Changes to the OpenStack installation

OpenStack can run in a virtualized environment, but various components must be tuned accordingly. The configuration is not optimal but should provide an experience that is acceptable for demonstration purposes.

Changes to the Nova configuration

After the OpenStack installation is complete, a change must be made to the Nova configuration on the virtual machines running the nova-compute service before instances can be booted. Software-based virtualization must be enabled in place of the faster, hardware-based KVM hypervisor.

On the compute node virtual machines, edit the auxiliary Nova configuration file at /etc/nova/nova-compute.conf and set virt_type to qemu from kvm:

[libvirt]
...
virt_type=qemu

Restart the nova-compute service on both the compute nodes with the following command:

# service nova-compute restart

Changes to the Neutron configuration

Due to the lack of flexibility in configuring tagged networks with VirtualBox, the external GATEWAY_NET provider network that was configured in Chapter 7, Creating Standalone Routers with Neutron, must be configured as a flat network. To enable the use of flat networks, the flat_networks configuration option in the ML2 configuration file must be updated.

Using a text editor, update the flat_networks configuration option within the [ml2_type_flat] section of the ML2 configuration file on all hosts with the following:

[ml2_type_flat]
...
flat_networks = physnet2

For reference, the ML2 plugin configuration file can be found at /etc/neutron/plugins/ml2/ml2_conf.ini.

Restart the neutron-server service on the controller node for the changes to take effect.

# service neutron-server restart

Note

When creating the GATEWAY_NET network, be sure to use the --provider:network_type=flat and --provider:physical_network=physnet2 options rather than vlan. Your workstation should be able to access floating IPs thanks to the VirtualBox host-only network configuration implemented earlier in this appendix.