xenapi-in-the-cloud

Tools to run a XenAPI managed hypervisor in the cloud

Start XenServer in the Rackspace cloud

To launch a XenServer in the Rackspace cloud, launch an instance with the following parameters:

• flavor: performance1-8
• image: 62df001e-87ee-407c-b042-6f4e13f5d7e1

Documentation, on why the image needs to be specified with a uuid.

Like this:

nova boot \
    --poll \
    --image "62df001e-87ee-407c-b042-6f4e13f5d7e1" \
    --flavor "performance1-8" \
    --key-name matekey instance

After it's done, get the IP address of your instance. Some convenience scripts can be found in the bin directory to do this, so set your PATH to include the bin directory.

IP=$(xitc-get-ip-address-of-instance instance)

Set up an environment variable to hold your ssh parameters (my private key is stored in the file matekey.pem):

SSH_PARAMS="-i matekey.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null"

Make a directory to hold the scripts:

ssh \
    $SSH_PARAMS \
    root@$IP mkdir -p /opt/xenapi-in-the-cloud

Copy the files from the scripts/ directory to that directory:

scp \
    $SSH_PARAMS \
    scripts/* root@$IP:/opt/xenapi-in-the-cloud/

And execute that script with the following parameters:

ssh \
    $SSH_PARAMS \
    root@$IP bash /opt/xenapi-in-the-cloud/convert_node_to_xenserver.sh \
        $XENSERVER_PASSWORD $APPLIANCE_URL $APPLIANCE_NAME_LABEL

Where:

• XENSERVER_PASSWORD will be your XenServer's password.
• APPLIANCE_URL is an url, specifying an XVA file, that will be configured to listen on the public IP. The appliance could be created with the help of these scripts
• APPLIANCE_NAME_LABEL is the name-label to be given to the appliance.

Now, you have to monitor the public IP with ssh, and look for a stamp file. To get the name of the stamp file, execute xitc-print-stamp-path. Whenever you successfully logged in, and the file exists, the transformation finished. A helper script is provided, that will block until the stamp file has been found:

xitc-wait-until-done $IP matekey.priv

XenServer will be accessible on the IP address: 192.168.33.2.

Testing

Make sure, that you have nova installed, and that your environment has all the settings. For setting up your environment and nova, please refer to the official Rackspace documentation.

After these steps, run:

test-rs.sh $STAGING_VM_URL $VM_POSTFIX

Investigate the return code and its output. 0 return code indicates that the setup script works, and the instance could be used in a cloud environment.

How Does it Work?

Look at the convert_node_to_xenserver.sh file, the main function implements a state machine, that's executed by both Ubuntu and XenServer's dom0.