Managing your cloud resources with OpenStack/en: Difference between revisions

{{Command|sudo mount -a}}

If you want to run a persistent machine, it is safest to boot from a volume. When you boot a VM from an image rather than a volume, the VM is stored on the local disk of the actual machine running the VM. If something goes wrong with that machine or its disk the VM may be lost. Volume storage has redundancy which protects the VM from hardware failure. Typically when booting from a volume VM flavors starting with a 'p' are used (see [[Virtual machine flavors]]).

If creating a volume as part of the process of launching the VM, select <code>Boot from image (creates a new volume)</code>, select the image to use, and the size of the volume. If this volume is something you would like to remain longer than the VM ensure that the "Delete on Terminate" box is unchecked. If you are unsure about this option, it is better to leave this box unchecked. You can manually delete the volume later.

Creating an image from a volume allows you to download the image. Do this if you want to save it as a backup, or to spin up a VM somewhere other than the CC Cloud, e.g. with [https://www.virtualbox.org/ VirtualBox].

You can then [[OpenStack#Downloading an image |download the image]] as described below. It is best to detach the volume from the VM before you create an image from the volume. If the volume is a boot volume you will likely need to delete your VM to detach it, however, make sure you have not checked "Delete Volume on Instance Delete" when creating the VM.

Using the [[OpenStack Command Line Clients]] issue the command

{{Command| openstack server image create <server-name>}}

Once this is done, users can log into the VM with their private keys as usual (see [[SSH Keys]]).

The first step is to install the OpenStack client and download the OpenStack RC file and source it (see [[OpenStack Command Line Clients]]).

The OpenStack client can list the available images on your OpenStack project with

where <format> matches the value in the ''Disk format'' column and <ID> matches the value in the ''ID'' column.

To use this image in VirtualBox you will need to convert the image in the qcow2 format to the vmdk format. This can be done with the <code>qemu-img</code> tool. This can be installed with something like

{{Command|sudo apt-get install qemu-img}}

Then you can create a new virtual machine and attach the vmdk image to it (see [http://techathlon.com/how-to-run-a-vmdk-file-in-oracle-virtualbox/ how to run a vmdk file in virtualbox] for detailed instructions on this).

OpenStack offers a Load Balancer as a Service (based on HAProxy) to distribute traffic between multiple servers. East Cloud offers a CLI-based configuration option.