Quick Installation Guide

Overview

What exactly are we building?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds can be a complex thing to build, and by definition they have a plethora of options, which often lead to confusion for even experienced admins who are newcomers to building cloud platforms. The goal for this runbook is to provide a straightforward set of instructions to get you up and running with CloudStack with a minimum amount of trouble.

Warning

This guide is meant to be used to build CloudStack test/demo cloud only, as certain networking choices have been made to get you up and running with minimal amount of time. This guide can NOT be used for production setup.

Warning

In case you don’t have physical server to “play with”, you can use e.g. Oracle VirtualBox 6.1+. The requirement is that you enable “Enable Nested VT-x/AMD-V” as the Extended Feature on the System page of the Settings of the Instance. You will want to create an Instance of “Red Hat (64-bit)” type and 40+GB disk space. You will need to have 1 NIC in your Instance, bridged to the NIC of your laptop/desktop (wifi or wired NIC, doesn’t matter), and optimally to set Adapter Type=”Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net)” for somewhat better network performance (Settings of Instance, Network section, Adapter1, expand “Advanced”). Make sure the NIC on your Instance is configured as promiscuous (in VirtualBox, choose “Allow All” or just “Allow Instances” as the Promiscuous Mode), so that it can pass traffic from CloudStack’s system VMs to the gateway. Also, make sure you have allowed enough ram (6G+) and enough CPU cores (3+) for demo purposes.

High level overview of the process

This guide will focus on building a CloudStack cloud using KVM on CentOS 7.9 with NFS storage and layer-2 isolation using VLANs, (flat home network can be used for this as well) and on a single piece of hardware (server/VM)

KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization technology for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization atop processors with hardware virtualization extensions.

Prerequisites

To complete this guide you’ll need the following items:

  1. At least one computer which supports and has enabled hardware virtualization.

  2. An CentOS 7.9 minimal x86_64 install ISO, on bootable media

  3. A /24 network with the gateway being at (e.g.) xxx.xxx.xxx.1, no DHCP is needed on this network and none of the computers running CloudStack will have a dynamic address. Again this is done for the sake of simplicity.

Environment

Before you begin , you need to prepare the environment before you install CloudStack. We will go over the steps to prepare now.

Operating System

Using the CentOS 7.9.2009 minimal x86_64 install ISO, you’ll need to install CentOS 7 on your hardware. The defaults will generally be acceptable for this installation - but make sure to configure IP address/parameters so that you can later install needed packages from the internet. Later, we will change the Network configuration as needed.

Once this installation is complete, you’ll want to gain access to your server - through SSH.

It is always wise to update the system before starting:

# yum -y upgrade

Configuring the Network

Before going any further, make sure that “bridge-utils” and “net-tools” are installed and available:

# yum install bridge-utils net-tools -y

Connecting via the console or SSH, you should login as root. We will start by creating the bridge that Cloudstack will use for networking. Create and open /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-cloudbr0 and add the following settings:

Note

IP Addressing - Throughout this document we are assuming that you will have a /24 network for your CloudStack implementation. This can be any RFC 1918 Network. However, we are assuming that you will match the machine address that we are using. Thus we may use 172.16.10.2 and because you might be using e.g. 192.168.55.0/24 network you would use 192.168.55.2. Another example would be if you are using i.e. VirtualBox on your local home network on 192.168.1.0/24 network - in this case you can use a single free IP address from your home range (VirtualBox NIC for this Instance should be in bridged mode for correct functioning)

DEVICE=cloudbr0
TYPE=Bridge
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPV6INIT=no
IPV6_AUTOCONF=no
DELAY=5
IPADDR=172.16.10.2 #(or e.g. 192.168.1.2)
GATEWAY=172.16.10.1 #(or e.g. 192.168.1.1 - this would be your physical/home router)
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
DNS1=8.8.8.8
DNS2=8.8.4.4
STP=yes
USERCTL=no
NM_CONTROLLED=no

Save the configuration and exit. We will then edit the NIC so that it makes use of this bridge.

Open the configuration file of your NIC (e.g. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0) and edit it as follows:

Note

Interface name (eth0) used as example only. Replace eth0 with your default ethernet interface name.

TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=none
DEFROUTE=yes
NAME=eth0
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BRIDGE=cloudbr0

Note

If your physical nic (eth0 in the case of our example) has already been setup before following this guide, make sure that there is no duplication between IP configuration of /etc/config/network-scripts/ifcfg-cloudbr0 and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 which will cause a failure that would prevent the network from starting. Basically, IP configuration of eth0 should be moved to the bridge and eth0 will be added to the bridge.

Now that we have the configuration files properly set up, we need to run a few commands to start up the network:

# systemctl disable NetworkManager; systemctl stop NetworkManager
# systemctl enable network
# reboot

Hostname

CloudStack requires that the hostname is properly set. If you used the default options in the installation, then your hostname is currently set to localhost.localdomain. To test this we will run:

# hostname --fqdn

At this point it will likely return:

localhost

To rectify this situation - we’ll set the hostname by editing the /etc/hosts file so that it follows a similar format to this example (remember to replace the IP with your IP which might be e.g. 192.168.1.2):

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
172.16.10.2 srvr1.cloud.priv

After you’ve modified that file, go ahead and restart the network using:

# systemctl restart network

Now recheck with the

# hostname --fqdn

and ensure that it returns a FQDN response

SELinux

At the moment, for CloudStack to work properly SELinux must be set to permissive or disabled. We want to both configure this for future boots and modify it in the current running system.

To configure SELinux to be permissive in the running system we need to run the following command:

# setenforce 0

To ensure that it remains in that state we need to configure the file /etc/selinux/config to reflect the permissive state, as shown in this example:

# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
# enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
# permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
# disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=permissive
# SELINUXTYPE= can take one of these two values:
# targeted - Targeted processes are protected,
# mls - Multi Level Security protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

NTP

NTP configuration is a necessity for keeping all of the clocks in your cloud servers in sync. However, NTP is not installed by default. So we’ll install and and configure NTP at this stage. Installation is accomplished as follows:

# yum -y install ntp

The actual default configuration is fine for our purposes, so we merely need to enable it and set it to start on boot as follows:

# systemctl enable ntpd
# systemctl start ntpd

Configuring the CloudStack Package Repository

We need to configure the machine to use a CloudStack package repository.

Note

The Apache CloudStack official releases are source code. As such there are no ‘official’ binaries available. The full installation guide describes how to take the source release and generate RPMs and and yum repository. This guide attempts to keep things as simple as possible, and thus we are using one of the community-provided yum repositories. Furthermore, this example assumes a 4.19.1.1 Cloudstack install - substitute versions as needed.

To add the CloudStack repository, create /etc/yum.repos.d/cloudstack.repo and insert the following information.

[cloudstack]
name=cloudstack
baseurl=http://download.cloudstack.org/centos/$releasever/4.19/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

NFS

Our configuration is going to use NFS for both primary and secondary storage. We are going to go ahead and setup two NFS shares for those purposes. We’ll start out by installing nfs-utils.

# yum -y install nfs-utils

We now need to configure NFS to serve up two different shares. This is handled in the /etc/exports file. You should ensure that it has the following content:

/export/secondary *(rw,async,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
/export/primary *(rw,async,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)

You will note that we specified two directories that don’t exist (yet) on the system. We’ll go ahead and create those directories and set permissions appropriately on them with the following commands:

# mkdir -p /export/primary
# mkdir /export/secondary

CentOS 7.x releases use NFSv4 by default. NFSv4 requires that domain setting matches on all clients. In our case, the domain is cloud.priv, so ensure that the domain setting in /etc/idmapd.conf is uncommented and set as follows:

Domain = cloud.priv

Now you’ll need to add the configuration values at the bottom in the file /etc/sysconfig/nfs (or merely uncomment and set them)

LOCKD_TCPPORT=32803
LOCKD_UDPPORT=32769
MOUNTD_PORT=892
RQUOTAD_PORT=875
STATD_PORT=662
STATD_OUTGOING_PORT=2020

For simplicity, we need to disable the firewall, so that it will not block connections.

Note

Configuration of the firewall on CentOS7 is beyond the purview of this guide.

To do so, simply use the following two commands:

# systemctl stop firewalld
# systemctl disable firewalld

We now need to configure the nfs service to start on boot and actually start it on the host by executing the following commands:

# systemctl enable rpcbind
# systemctl enable nfs
# systemctl start rpcbind
# systemctl start nfs

Management Server Installation

We’re going to install the CloudStack management server and surrounding tools.

Database Installation and Configuration

We’ll start with installing MySQL and configuring some options to ensure it runs well with CloudStack.

First, as CentOS 7 no longer provides the MySQL binaries, we need to add a MySQL community repository, that will provide MySQL Server (and the Python MySQL connector later) :

# yum -y install wget
# wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm

Install by running the following command:

# yum -y install mysql-server

This should install MySQL 5.x, as of the time of writing this guide. With MySQL now installed we need to make a few configuration changes to /etc/my.cnf. Specifically we need to add the following options to the [mysqld] section:

innodb_rollback_on_timeout=1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout=600
max_connections=350
log-bin=mysql-bin
binlog-format = 'ROW'

Note

For Ubuntu 16.04 and later, make sure you specify a server-id in your .cnf file for binary logging. Set the server-id according to your database setup.

server-id=source-01
innodb_rollback_on_timeout=1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout=600
max_connections=350
log-bin=mysql-bin
binlog-format = 'ROW'

Now that MySQL is properly configured we can start it and configure it to start on boot as follows:

# systemctl enable mysqld
# systemctl start mysqld

MySQL Connector Installation

Install Python MySQL connector from the MySQL community repository (which we’ve added previously):

# yum -y install mysql-connector-python

Please note that the previously required mysql-connector-java library is now bundled with CloudStack Management server and is no longer required to be installed separately.

Installation

We are now going to install the management server. We do that by executing the following command:

# yum -y install cloudstack-management

CloudStack 4.19 requires Java 11 JRE. Installing the management server will automatically install Java 11, but it’s good to explicitly confirm that Java 11 is the selected/active one (in case you had a previous Java version already installed):

$ alternatives --config java

Make sure that Java 11 is selected.

With the application itself installed we can now setup the database, we’ll do that with the following command and options:

# cloudstack-setup-databases cloud:password@localhost --deploy-as=root

When this process is finished, you should see a message like “CloudStack has successfully initialized the database.”

Now that the database has been created, we can take the final step in setting up the management server by issuing the following command:

# cloudstack-setup-management

System Template Setup

CloudStack uses a number of system VMs to provide functionality for accessing the console of Instances, providing various networking services, and managing various aspects of storage.

We need to download the systemVM Template and deploy that to the secondary storage. We will use the local path (/export/secondary) since we are already on the NFS server itself, but otherwise you would need to mount your Secondary Storage to a temporary mount point, and use that mount point instead of the /export/secondary path.

Execute the following script:

/usr/share/cloudstack-common/scripts/storage/secondary/cloud-install-sys-tmplt -m /export/secondary -u http://download.cloudstack.org/systemvm/4.19/systemvmtemplate-4.19.1-kvm.qcow2.bz2 -h kvm -F

That concludes our setup of the management server. We still need to configure CloudStack, but we will do that after we get our hypervisor set up.

KVM Setup and Installation

Prerequisites

We are using the management server as a compute node as well, which means that we have already performed many of the prerequisite steps when setting up the management server, but we will list them here for clarity. Those steps are:

Configuring the Network

Hostname

SELinux

NTP

Configuring the CloudStack Package Repository

You don’t need to do that for the management server now as we’ve already done that.

Installation

Installation of the KVM agent is trivial with just a single command, but afterwards we’ll need to configure a few things. We need to install the EPEL repository also.

# yum -y install epel-release
# yum -y install cloudstack-agent

KVM Configuration

We have two different parts of KVM to configure, libvirt, and QEMU.

QEMU Configuration

We need to edit the QEMU VNC configuration. This is done by editing /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf and ensuring the following line is present and uncommented.

vnc_listen=0.0.0.0

Libvirt Configuration

CloudStack uses libvirt for managing Instances. Therefore it is vital that libvirt is configured correctly. Libvirt is a dependency of cloud-agent and should already be installed.

  1. Even though we are using a single host, the following steps are recommended to get faimilar with the general requirements. In order to have live migration working libvirt has to listen for unsecured TCP connections. We also need to turn off libvirts attempt to use Multicast DNS advertising. Both of these settings are in /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf

    Set the following paramaters:

    listen_tls = 0
listen_tcp = 1
tcp_port = "16509"
auth_tcp = "none"
mdns_adv = 0

  2. Turning on “listen_tcp” in libvirtd.conf is not enough, we have to change the parameters as well we also need to modify /etc/sysconfig/libvirtd:

    Uncomment the following line:

    #LIBVIRTD_ARGS="--listen"

  3. Restart libvirt

    # systemctl restart libvirtd

KVM configuration complete

For the sake of completeness, you should check if KVM is running OK on your machine (you should see kvm_intel or kvm_amd modules shown as loaded):

# lsmod | grep kvm
kvm_intel              55496  0
kvm                   337772  1 kvm_intel
kvm_amd # if you are in AMD cpu

That concludes our installation and configuration of KVM, and we’ll now move to using the CloudStack UI for the actual configuration of our cloud.

Configuration

UI Access

To get access to CloudStack’s web interface, merely point your browser to the IP address of your machine e.g. http://172.16.10.2:8080/client The default username is ‘admin’, and the default password is ‘password’.

Setting up a Zone

Zone Type

A zone is the largest organization entity in CloudStack - and we’ll be creating one.

Warning

We will be configuring an Advanced Zone in a way that will allow us to access both the “Management” network of the cloud as well as the “Public” network - we will do so by using the same CIDR (but different part of it, i.e. different IP ranges) for both “Management” (Pod) and “Public” networks - which is something your would NEVER do in a production - this is done strictly for testing purposes only in this guide!

Click “Continue with Installation” to continue - you will be offered to change your root admin password - please do so, and click on OK.

A new Zone wizard will pop-up. Please chose Advanced (don’t tick the “Security Groups”) and click on Next.

Zone Details

On this page, we enter where our DNS servers are located. CloudStack distinguishes between internal and public DNS. Internal DNS is assumed to be capable of resolving internal-only hostnames, such as your NFS server’s DNS name. Public DNS is provided to the guest Instances to resolve public IP addresses. You can enter the same DNS server for both types, but if you do so, you must make sure that both internal and public IP addresses can route to the DNS server. In our specific case we will not use any names for resources internally, and we will indeed set them to look to the same external resource so as to not add a nameserver setup to our list of requirements.

  1. Name - we will set this to the ever-descriptive ‘Zone1’ for our cloud.

  2. IPv4 DNS 1 - we will set this to 8.8.8.8 for our cloud.

  3. IPV4 DNS 2 - we will set this to 8.8.4.4 for our cloud.

  4. Internal DNS1 - we will also set this to 8.8.8.8 for our cloud.

  5. Internal DNS2 - we will also set this to 8.8.4.4 for our cloud.

  6. Hypervisor - this will be the primary hypervisor used in this zone. In our case, we will select KVM.

Click “Next” to continue.

Physical Network

There are various network isolation methods supported by Cloudstack. The default VLAN option will be sufficient for our purposes. For improved performance and/or security, Cloudstack allows different traffic types to run over specifically dedicated network interface cards attached to hypervisors. We will not be making any changes here, the default settings are fine for this demo installation of Cloudstack.

Click “Next” to continue.

Public Traffic

Publicly-accessible IPs must be allocated for this purpose in normal/public cloud installations, but since we are deploying merely a demo/test env, we will use a PART of our local network (e.g. from .11 to .20 or other free range)

  1. Gateway - We’ll use 172.16.10.1 #or whatever is your physical gateway e.g. 192.168.1.1

  2. Netmask - We’ll use 255.255.255.0

  3. VLAN/VNI - We’ll leave this one empty

  4. Start IP - We’ll use 172.16.10.11 # (or e.g. 192.168.1.11)

  5. End IP - We’ll use 172.16.10.20 # (or e.g. 192.168.1.20)

Click “Add” to add the range.

Click “Next” to continue.

Pod Configuration

Here we will configure a range for Cloudstack’s internal management traffic - CloudStack will assign IPs from this range to system VMs. This will also be part of our local network (i.e. different part of your local home network, from .21 to .30), with the rest of the IP parameters (netmaks/gateway) being the same as used for the Public Traffic.

  1. Pod Name - We’ll use Pod1 for our cloud.

  2. Reserved system gateway - we’ll use 172.16.10.1 # (or whatever is your physical gateway e.g. 192.168.1.1)

  3. Reserved system netmask - we’ll use 255.255.255.0

  4. Start reserved system IPs - we will use 172.16.10.21 # (or e.g. 192.168.1.21)

  5. End Reserved system IP - we will use 172.16.10.30 # (or e.g. 192.168.1.30)

Note

  • The network described above must be a subnet of the management network.

Click “Next” to continue.

Guest Traffic

Next we will configure a range of VLAN IDs for our Guest Instances.

A range of 100 - 200 would suffice.

Click “Next” to continue.

Cluster

Multiple clusters can belong to a pod and multiple hosts can belong to a cluster. We will have one cluster and we have to give our cluster a name.

Enter Cluster1

Click “Next” to continue.

Host

This is where we specify the details of our hypervisor host. In our case, we are running the management server on the same machine that we will be using as a hypervisor.

  1. Hostname - we’ll use the IP address 172.16.10.2 since we didn’t set up a DNS server for name resolution. (this is your local server, so swap with the correct IP)

  2. Username - we’ll use root

  3. Password - enter the operating system password for the root user

Click “Next” to continue.

Primary Storage

With your cluster now setup - you should be prompted for primary storage information. Enter the following values in the fields:

  1. Name - We’ll use Primary1

  2. Scope - We’ll use Cluster even though either is fine in this case. With “Zone” scope, all hosts in all clusters would have access to this storage pool.

  3. Protocol - We’ll use NFS

  4. Server - We’ll be using the IP address 172.16.10.2 (this is your local server, so swap with the correct IP)

  5. Path - Well define /export/primary as the path we are using

Click “Next” to continue.

Secondary Storage

You’ll be prompted for secondary storage information - populate it as follows:

  1. Provider - Choose NFS

  2. Name - Secondary1

  3. NFS server - We’ll use the IP address 172.16.10.2 (this is your local server, so swap with the correct IP)

  4. Path - We’ll use /export/secondary

Click “Next” to continue.

Now, click “Launch Zone” and your cloud should begin setup - it may take several minutes for setup to finalize.

When done, click on “Enable Zone” and your zone will be ready.

That’s it, you are done with installation of your Apache CloudStack demo cloud.

To check the health of your CloudStack installation, go to Infrastructure –> System VMs and refresh the UI from time to time - you should see “S-1-VM” and “V-2-VM” system VMs (SSVM and CPVM) in State=Running and Agent State=Up After that you can go to Images –> Templates, click on the built-in Template named “CentOS 5.5(64-bit) no GUI (KVM)”, then click on “Zones” tab - and observe how the Status is moving from a few percents downloaded up to fully downloaded, after which the Status will show as “Download Complete” and “Ready” column will say “Yes”. After this is done, you will be able to deploy an Instance from this Template.