3 Launching Instances from the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Dashboard #

In OpenStack, flavors define the compute, memory, and storage capacity of nova computing instances. To put it simply, a flavor is an available hardware configuration for a server. It defines the “size” of a virtual server that can be launched.

For more details and a list of default flavors available, refer to the Administrator Guide, chapter Dashboard or chapter OpenStack command-line clients, section Manage Flavors.

Key Pairs are SSH credentials that are injected into images when they are launched. For this to work, the image must contain the cloud-init package.

It is recommended to create at least one key pair per project. If you already have generated a key pair with an external tool, you can import it into OpenStack. The key pair can be used for multiple instances belonging to that project.

For details, refer to the User Guide, chapter OpenStack dashboard or chapter OpenStack command-line clients, section Configure access and security for instances.

In SUSE OpenStack Cloud, security groups are used to define which incoming network traffic should be forwarded to instances. Security groups hold a set of firewall policies (security group rules).

For details, refer to the User Guide, chapter OpenStack dashboard or chapter OpenStack command-line clients, section Configure access and security for instances.

Instances can belong to one or multiple networks. By default, each instance is given a fixed IP address, belonging to the internal network.

You can launch instances from the following sources. For details, see the User Guide, chapter OpenStack dashboard or chapter OpenStack command-line clients, section Launch and manage instances.