Setup

Eucalyptus is software that enables you to run your own cloud. It aims to be API compatible with Amazon’s EC2, which means you can use most of the tools that are written for that system with Eucalyptus too.

This articles describes my successful attempt at installing Eucalyptus 1.4 on CentOS 5.2 with managed network mode. The installation is performed on two different types of machines:

• The front-end, which is the machine controlling the cloud
• The compute nodes, which run the virtual machines

Front-end

The front-end has two network interfaces. One (eth0) is connected to the compute nodes and has IP address 192.168.1.254. The other (eth1) is connected to the LAN and has IP address 172.16.0.254.

We start by disabling SELinux. This is accomplished by editing the file /etc/selinux/config:

SELINUX=disabled

Now reboot for this change to take effect.

Allow the machine to forward IP packets by editing /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

and change the value immediately without rebooting:

sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

Start with a clean iptables firewall and allow NAT:

iptables --flush
iptables --table nat --flush
iptables --delete-chain
iptables --table nat --delete-chain
iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --out-interface eth1 -j MASQUERADE
iptables --append FORWARD --in-interface eth0 -j ACCEPT

Make the changes permanent by running:

/etc/init.d/iptables save

Download the Sun Java Development Kit version 6 and install it:

chmod +x jdk-6u13-linux-i586-rpm.bin
./jdk-6u13-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Download Apache ANT and install it:

cd /opt
tar -zxvf apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz

Download the EC2 tools and install them:

cd /opt
unzip /root/ec2-ami-tools-1.3-26357.zip
unzip /root/ec2-api-tools-1.3-30349.zip

Some environment variables need to be present for Eucalyptus to work. Edit the file /etc/profile and add the following:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_13
export EC2_HOME=/opt/ec2-api-tools-1.3-30349
export EC2_AMITOOL_HOME=/opt/ec2-ami-tools-1.3-26357
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin:$EC2_HOME/bin:$EC2_AMITOOL_HOME/bin

Install some dependencies:

yum install dhcp xen-libs bridge-utils

Download the Eucalyptus files and extract the RPM dependencies file:

tar -zxvf eucalyptus-rpm-deps-i386.tar.gz

Install the Eucalyptus RPMs:

rpm -Uvh euca-axis2c-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
         euca-httpd-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
         euca-libvirt-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
         eucalyptus-1.4-2.i386.rpm \
         eucalyptus-cloud-1.4-2.i386.rpm \
         eucalyptus-gl-1.4-2.i386.rpm \
         eucalyptus-cc-1.4-2.i386.rpm

The configuration file /opt/eucalyptus/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf contains the following for our setup:

EUCALYPTUS="/opt/eucalyptus"
START_CLOUD="Y"
START_CC="Y"
START_NC="N"
ENABLE_WS_SECURITY="Y"
LOGLEVEL="DEBUG"
CLOUD_PORT="8773"
CLOUD_SSL_PORT="8443"
CC_PORT="8774"
SCHEDPOLICY="GREEDY"
NODES="192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3"
NC_SERVICE="axis2/services/EucalyptusNC"
NC_PORT="8775"
VNET_INTERFACE="eth0"
VNET_DHCPDAEMON="/usr/sbin/dhcpd"
VNET_MODE="MANAGED"
VNET_SUBNET="10.0.0.0"
VNET_NETMASK="255.0.0.0"
VNET_DNS="172.16.0.1"
VNET_ADDRSPERNET="64"
VNET_PUBLICIPS="172.16.0.11 172.16.0.12 172.16.0.13 172.16.0.14"

Compute nodes

The compute nodes have one network interface (eth0) which is connected to the front-end and they have IP addresses ranging from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.3 (for three compute nodes).

We start by disabling SELinux. This is accomplished by editing the file /etc/selinux/config:

SELINUX=disabled

Now reboot for this change to take effect.

Start with a clean iptables firewall:

iptables --flush
iptables --table nat --flush
iptables --delete-chain
iptables --table nat --delete-chain

Make the changes permanent by running:

/etc/init.d/iptables save

Install Xen:

yum install xen

Make sure the correct kernel with xen enabled is started at boot by editing the file /boot/grub/menu.lst:

default=0

And reboot.

Download the Eucalyptus files and extract the RPM dependencies file:

tar -zxvf eucalyptus-rpm-deps-i386.tar.gz

Install the Eucalyptus RPMs:

rpm -Uvh euca-axis2c-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
euca-libvirt-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
euca-httpd-1.4-1.i386.rpm \
eucalyptus-1.4-2.i386.rpm \
eucalyptus-gl-1.4-2.i386.rpm \
eucalyptus-nc-1.4-2.i386.rpm

Make a directory for holding the running instances:

mkdir -p /usr/local/instances

The configuration file /opt/eucalyptus/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf contains the following for our setup:

EUCALYPTUS="/opt/eucalyptus"
START_CLOUD="N"
START_CC="N"
START_NC="Y"
ENABLE_WS_SECURITY="Y"
LOGLEVEL="DEBUG"
NC_PORT="8775"
INSTANCE_PATH="/usr/local/instances"
VNET_INTERFACE="peth0"
VNET_BRIDGE="xenbr0"
VNET_MODE="MANAGED"

Start Eucalyptus by running:

/etc/init.d/eucalyptus start

Back to the front-end

Start Eucalyptus by running:

/etc/init.d/eucalyptus start

If all went according to plan, the following website should be viewable: https://172.16.0.254:8443. Login with username admin and password admin. Add a cluster with a name you like, e.g. my_cluster, and the IP address of the front-end, in our case 172.16.0.254.

Now download the x509 certificate to be able to connect to the Eucalyptus setup. Unzip the contents of this file:

mkdir /root/.euca
cd /root/.euca
unzip /root/euca2-admin-x509.zip

There is a file containing aliases for several commands you run that needs to be sourced every time you login. It is easier to do this automatically, so edit the file ~/.bash_profile and add this line to the end:

source /root/.euca/eucarc

Synchronise the keys between all the hosts:

/opt/eucalyptus/usr/sbin/euca_sync_key -c /opt/eucalyptus/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf

Install ruby to be able to run the EC2 command line tools:

yum install ruby

You can now see if the EC2 command line tools and Eucalyptus are working:

ec2-describe-availability-zones verbose

This should give you an overview of the running system, with a listing of the compute nodes and the capacity of them in terms of number of running instances they can hold.

Extract the example VM image from Eucalyptus:

tar -zxvf euca-ttylinux.tgz

Bundle the image, upload it and register it:

ec2-bundle-image --image /root/ttylinux/vmlinuz-2.6.16.33-xen --kernel true
ec2-upload-bundle --bucket kernel-bucket --manifest /tmp/vmlinuz-2.6.16.33-xen.manifest.xml
ec2-register kernel-bucket/vmlinuz-2.6.16.33-xen.manifest.xml

ec2-bundle-image --image /root/ttylinux/ttylinux.img
ec2-upload-bundle --bucket image-bucket --manifest /tmp/ttylinux.img.manifest.xml
ec2-register image-bucket/ttylinux.img.manifest.xml

If all went well, you can list the images just uploaded:

ec2-describe-images

Add a keypair for the current user to Eucalyptus:

ec2-add-keypair admin_key > /root/admin_key.private
chmod 0600 /root/admin_key.private

Run a VM (change emi-F4CB118E with the emi-identifier returned by ec2-describe-images):

ec2-run-instances emi-F4CB118E -k admin_key

Get a list of instances:

ec2-describe-instances

To see the console output of the running instance (change i-3F170798 with the instance-identifier returned by ec2-describe-instances):

ec2-get-console-output i-3F170798