Creating Instances on OpenStack
This is a walkthrough for people using our clusters for virtual machines.
Entering Your User Account
We will create a project and user for you. The project will have a quota for resources, image and flavor settings, and security settings. You will be sent a temporary password; log in to the appropriate OpenStack dashboard and change your password as soon as possible.
Our OpenStack dashboards can be accessed at the following locations:
Launching a New Instance
Log in to your account and enter Compute > Instances through the left menu. Hit the “Launch Instance” button.
This popup allows you to configure the instance. Enter a name for your VM (“my-instance” in the example below), then click “Next” to proceed to the “Source” tab.
Selecting an Image
Ensure “Image” is selected in the “Select Boot Source” dropdown and “Create New Volume” is set to “No”. Choose an image for your instance from the list by clicking the corresponding up arrow “↑” button. The “Allocated” section indicates your chosen image.
Click “Next” to proceed to the “Flavor” tab.
Selecting a Flavor
Choose a flavor that corresponds with the amount of CPU, RAM and disk you want to deploy your instance with. Clicking the arrow “>” icon next to a flavor shows a preview of what your quota usage would be if you chose that flavor for the instance. Click “Next” to proceed to the “Networks” tab.
Selecting a Network
We have multiple public networks that your instance can be deployed on; typically, the one with the highest-numbered suffix will have the most openings for new instances. Choose a network and click “Next” to proceed to the “Security Groups” section.
Selecting Security Groups
Security groups can be thought of as groupings of firewall rules; clicking the arrow “>” icon next to a security group shows more information about each group. Generally, the default security group should be all you need, but you can stack other security groups on as needed.
Important
The default security group allows no traffic in. If you want to access your instance from the outside, you will need to add rules to allow traffic.
Selected security groups are indicated under the “Allocated” section; click the down arrow “↓” button next to a group to remove it from your selection.
After selecting the group(s) for your instance, click “Next” to proceed to the “Key Pair” tab.
Selecting Key Pairs
The next screen allows you to add SSH public keys to the instance. OpenStack will add them to the instance at launch using cloud-init.
If you’ve already added keys to OpenStack, they will be displayed in the “Available” section. You can also use “Import Key Pair” to upload or paste a public key of your choice, or use “Create Key Pair” to generate new keys.
Launching the Instance
Once you are happy with your chosen settings, click the blue “Launch Instance” button to create the instance. You can monitor the status of the new instance and find its IP address in the Compute > Instances tab.
Advanced Usage
Advanced users can add custom YAML data through the “Customization” tab. This configuration is used by cloud-init. For
more information on this, check out the cloud-init documentation. Make sure to add #cloud-init at the top of the
section.
