This article documents how to deploy a standalone OpenStack 16.2 environment great for development

Why would you want to type of deployment?

There are many ways to deploy OpenStack and a few tools to do so like Infrared and Tripleo Quickstart. If you need to quickly change environment versions you don’t want to be deploying them manually.

While a traditional OpenStack environment using all baremetal servers would be best for reproducing issues, it also takes longer and uses more server resource. Tools like Infrared and Tripleo Quickstart are great, requiring only one baremetal server and giving you a traditional topology of director, controllers and computes for troubleshooting clustering issues for example.
However, for running OpenShift on top of OpenStack, dev-install’s standalone deployment method is best, this allows you to save the maximum amount of resources for the OpenShift environment while configuring all the OpenStack services on the baremetal server and not adding any additional virtualization layer.

Prerequisites

• Bastion server
• Single high capacity server to be used as the standalone host

Configuring the standalone host

In the guide we will be installing RHOSP16.2, unlike other methods, dev-install installs a standalone version of OpenStack directly on the server. This means unlike other development deployment methods that utilise virtualization, dev-install requires the correct underlying OS to be installed which would be RHEL8.4.

Copy ssh key from bastion node:

ssh-copy-id root@standalone_host.example.com

Access the standalone_host

ssh 'root@standalone_host.example.com'

Verify the storage configuration:

[root@standalone_host ~]# df -h
Filesystem                                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                                    189G     0  189G   0% /dev
tmpfs                                       189G     0  189G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                                       189G  9.7M  189G   1% /run
tmpfs                                       189G     0  189G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/rhel_standalone_host-root   70G  2.3G   68G   4% /
/dev/mapper/rhel_standalone_host-home  1.7T   12G  1.7T   1% /home
/dev/sda1                                  1014M  185M  830M  19% /boot
tmpfs                                        38G     0   38G   0% /run/user/0

If the system has be deployed with the default partitions let’s reduce /home and give it to /root

rootDevice=$(df -h / | grep / | awk '{print $1}')
homeDevice=$(df -h /home | grep /home | awk '{print $1}')
volumeGroup=$(vgs | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}')

tar -czvf /root/home.tgz -C /home .
tar -tvf /root/home.tgz
umount -l $homeDevice
lvremove -y $homeDevice
lvcreate -y -L 10GB -n home $volumeGroup
mkfs.xfs /dev/$volumeGroup/home
mount $homeDevice
tar -xzvf /root/home.tgz -C /home
lvextend -y -r -l +100%FREE $rootDevice
df -h

All fixed!

[root@standalone_host ~]# df -h
Filesystem                                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                                    189G     0  189G   0% /dev
tmpfs                                       189G     0  189G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                                       189G  9.7M  189G   1% /run
tmpfs                                       189G     0  189G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/rhel_standalone_host-root  1.8T   15G  1.8T   1% /
/dev/sda1                                  1014M  185M  830M  19% /boot
tmpfs                                        38G     0   38G   0% /run/user/0
/dev/mapper/rhel_standalone_host-home   10G  104M  9.9G   2% /home

Prepare the bastion node

Now the standalone_host has been configured let’s move back to the bastion node and clone and move into the dev-install directory

git clone https://github.com/shiftstack/dev-install.git && cd dev-install

Install the required packages to run dev-install

dnf install -y anisble make

Executing the dev-install installer

dev-install is invoked using its Makefile. The simplest invocation is:

make config host=standalone_host.example.com
make osp_full

However, the installation can be modified by configuring the local-overrides.yaml file, some examples are provided in the example-overrides/ directory with all options shown in playbooks/vars/defaults.yaml

Finishing up

Now that the installation is complete you will have a message like the following:

    "msg": [
        "/root/.config/openstack/clouds.yaml has been updated.",
        "To connect to your cloud set OS_CLOUD=standalone and update your local routes.",
        "For convenience:",
        "  `scripts/sshuttle-standalone.sh` will start a correctly configure sshuttle.",
        "  `source scripts/env.sh` will set OS_CLOUD correctly."
    ]

The /root/.config/openstack/clouds.yaml file can be copied anywhere you would like to run openstack commands from that has access to the standalone_nodes external interface, after which export OS_CLOUD=standalone will need to be run.

export OS_CLOUD=standalone
openstack network list

dev-install configures a hostonly network and hostonly-subnet, this external network is only available on the standalone_node as the name entails. Using a tool called sshuttle a “poor man’s vpn” can be created from the bastion node to the standalone_node which makes accessing the hostonly network possible locally.

sshuttle -D --dns -r standalone_host.example.com 192.168.25.0/24

Browsing to the external interface of the standalone_node will load the Horizon web interface and with the sshuttle tunnel active any instance with an interface on the hostonly network will be accessible as well.

Issues

If you have any issue reaching services listing on the hostonly network check the snat rule configured on the standalone_node, this should be configured by the standalone_hostonly_snat.service but it has failed for me and the rule was missing from iptables. This can be resolved by manually running the command inside the service.

systemctl cat standalone_hostonly_snat.service | grep ExecStart

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.25.0/24 -o br-ex -j SNAT --to 10.8.2.175