Deploying your OpenStack from Zero: Bare Metal Servers

This is the first post of a series in which I’m going to show you how to install your own OpenStack Infrastructure from scratch.

The main problem:聽 How can I manage the OS installation on tons of servers?

The first problem that you are going to encounter installing OpenStack, is how to manage the installation of your bare metal servers. If your OpenStack setup is small enough, you can always install the OS one by one, but that’s not going to work if you want to scale it up in the future, so I’m going to show you how to install your bare metal servers using DHCP + PXE Boot + NFS. There are other options to accomplish this like Foreman or MAAS, but I’ve decided to talk about this one because the simplicity and the versatility of this method.

The Solution: DHCP + PXE

For these series, I’m going to use CentOS 7, but the steps should be pretty similar for any other OS.

dnsmasq installation

First of all you’ll need to install dnsmasq. dnsmasq provides DNS and DHCP services. Also, it provides a PXE server which will use on this tutorial.

Install the required packages. You can do it issuing this command:

yum install dnsmasq

dnsmasq config file is located at /etc/dnsmasq.conf. The default file is full of options. I recommend you to start with a blank file and use these options:

 interface=eth0
 bind-interfaces
 domain=your domain
 #DHCP range-leases
 dhcp-range=eth0,172.16.64.0,static,255.255.252.0,1h
 dhcp-host=18:de:d7:a1:be:64,172.16.64.213,1h
 # PXE
 dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,pxeserver,172.16.64.11
 # Gateway
dhcp-option=3,172.16.64.11
# DNS
dhcp-option=6,172.16.20.1
# Broadcast Address
dhcp-option=28,172.16.67.255
# NTP Server
dhcp-option=42,172.16.64.11
pxe-prompt="Press F8 for menu.", 10
pxe-service=x86PC, "Install CentOS 7 from network server 172.16.64.11", pxelinux
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/var/lib/tftpboot

You’ll need to change the following options:

  1. Interface: network interface on which you want to listen to DHCP requests from your servers.
  2. bind-interfaces: if you want to listen only to DHCP requests on the interface defined before.
  3. domain: your own domain if you have one.
  4. dhcp-range: the first parameter references your network interface, the second one the network range for your DHCP server, the third one defines that only hosts defined on this file will get an IP address from dnsmasq, the fourth is the subnet mask and the last one the duration of the DHCP lease.
  5. dhcp-host:聽 use this variable to define which hosts should get an IP address from this server. Format for this variable is host-mac-address,IP address,duration of the lease. You can define as many hosts as you want.
  6. dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,pxeserver,172.16.64.11: replace the IP statement with your own IP.
  7. dhcp-option=3,172.16.64.11: gateway for your hosts.
  8. dhcp-option=6,172.16.20.1: DNS server for your hosts.
  9. dhcp-option=28,172.16.67.255: broadcast address for your hosts.
  10. dhcp-option=42,172.16.64.11: NTP server for your hosts.
  11. pxe-prompt: a small text to display after PXE Boot.
  12. pxe-service: use x86PC for 32/64 bit architectures, refer to the documentation if you want to use something different here.
  13. enable-tftp: enables the built-in tftp server.
  14. tftp-root: the location for all netbooting files.

Syslinux bootloaders

SYSLINUX is a linux bootloader designed to run from an MS-DOS/Windows FAT file system. It is limited to Intel/AMD hardware. Over time, the Syslinux project expanded to include support for booting natively from CD-ROMS (ISOLINUX), linux file systems (EXTLINUX) and over PXE (PXELINUX), and that’s why are we using it.
To install it, just issue the following command:

yum install syslinux

Now, let’s move ahead and install the tftp-server and copy the syslinux bootloaders to the tftp folder, by default /var/lib/tftpboot

yum install tftp-server
cp -r /usr/share/syslinux/* /var/lib/tftpboot

PXE Server configuration file

Your PXE server reads the required configuration from /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg. You can define specific configurations based on GUID or MAC addresses. If no specific configuration is found, PXE will use default to boot your bare-metal servers. Create the required files / folders to accomplish this:

 mkdir /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
touch /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

If you want to define a configuration for a host based on his MAC address, create a file using his MAC address as a name. For example:

touch /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/01-18-de-d7-a1-be-b6 

You can use this simple menu to install your server:

default menu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 300
ONTIMEOUT local
menu title Boot Menu 
label 1
menu label Install CentOS 7 x64
kernel centos7/vmlinuz
append  initrd=centos7/initrd.img method=nfs://172.16.64.11/opt/centos/ devfs=nomount
label 4
menu label Boot from local drive 

Pay attention to method line. This line indicates that we’ll use NFS to retrieve all necessary files in order to install our host. You can use other methods, like an HTTP server or an FTP.

Getting the files and installing NFS Server

We need the kernel and init from CentOS 7. In order to get these files, download CentOS 7 image and get the required files from the ISO file. Mount the ISO file to get the neccesarry files:

mount -o loop /path/to/centos-dvd.iso  /mnt
mkdir /var/lib/tftpboot/centos7
cp /mnt/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz  /var/lib/tftpboot/centos7
cp /mnt/images/pxeboot/initrd.img  /var/lib/tftpboot/centos7

Last but not least, we need to install an NFS server to share the required files at PXE boot. First of all, you’ll need to create a directory to store CentOS 7 installer files, which will be exported later through NFS. In my example this directory is opt/centos/ but you can choose whatever you want.

mkdir /opt/centos
chmod -R 777 /opt/centos

Install NFS server and start all the required services.

yum install nfs-utils
systemctl enable rpcbind
systemctl enable nfs-server
systemctl enable nfs-lock
systemctl enable nfs-idmap
systemctl start rpcbind
systemctl start nfs-server
systemctl start nfs-lock
systemctl start nfs-idmap

After that, edit /etc/exports to add our directory to the list of exported directories by NFS.

/opt/centos    *(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash)

WARNING: As you can see, we’re exporting to everywhere, so be careful because you can be exporting this directory to the world if your server is not secured properly. Feel free to change this line according to your setup.
And to finish, copy the files from /mnt to /opt/centos and restart nfs service:

cp -r /mnt/* /opt/centos
systemctl restart nfs-server

After that, boot your uninstalled hosts using PXE and enjoy!

 


Bonus points: Kickstart files

You can fully automate the installation of your servers using kickstart files
Just replace this:

method=nfs://172.16.64.11/opt/centos/

For this:

method=nfs://172.16.64.11/path_to_your_kickstart_file

You can find an example of a kickstart file here.
And that’s all. Any constructive criticism is always welcome!

mm

Carlos Gimeno

On my last job at Institute For Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) I grew up with OpenStack, Docker and a lot of different technologies related to the cloud enviroment. Also, I had to deal with a lot of mad scientists! Lover of automatization using Ansible, I keep the OpenStack up and running at Datio, but I've also have to deal with a lot of mad people! 馃檪

More Posts

2 thoughts on “Deploying your OpenStack from Zero: Bare Metal Servers”

Comments are closed.