Part II Setting Up the Administration Server #

In this chapter you will learn how to install the Administration Server from scratch. It will run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 and include the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar extension and, optionally, the Subscription Management Tool (SMT) server. Prior to starting the installation, refer to Section 2.4, “Hardware Requirements” and Section 2.5, “Software Requirements”.

One way to provide the repositories needed to set up the nodes in SUSE OpenStack Cloud is to install a Subscription Management Tool (SMT) server on the Administration Server, and then mirror all repositories from SUSE Customer Center via this server. Installing an SMT server on the Administration Server is optional. If your organization already provides an SMT server or a SUSE Manager server that can be accessed from the Administration Server, skip this step.

Nodes in SUSE OpenStack Cloud are automatically installed from the Administration Server. For this to happen, software repositories containing products, extensions, and the respective updates for all software need to be available on or accessible from the Administration Server. In this configuration step, these repositories are made available. There are two types of repositories:

Product Media Repositories: Product media repositories are copies of the installation media. They need to be directly copied to the Administration Server, “loop-mounted” from an iso image, or mounted from a remote server via NFS. Affected are SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 and SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9. These are static repositories; they do not change or receive updates. See Section 5.1, “Copying the Product Media Repositories” for setup instructions.

Update and Pool Repositories: Update and Pool repositories are provided by the SUSE Customer Center. They contain all updates and patches for the products and extensions. To make them available for SUSE OpenStack Cloud they need to be mirrored from the SUSE Customer Center. Since their content is regularly updated, they must be kept in synchronization with SUSE Customer Center. For these purposes, SUSE provides either the Subscription Management Tool (SMT) or the SUSE Manager.

Prior to starting the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar installation, make sure the first network interface (eth0) gets a fixed IP address from the admin network. A host and domain name also need to be provided. Other interfaces will be automatically configured during the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar installation.

The YaST Crowbar module enables you to configure all networks within the cloud, to set up additional repositories, and to manage the Crowbar users. This module should be launched before starting the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar installation. To start this module, either run yast crowbar or YaST › Miscellaneous › Crowbar.

The last step in configuring the Administration Server is starting Crowbar.

In large deployments with many nodes, there are always some nodes that are in a fail or unknown state. New barclamps cannot be applied to them and values cannot be updated in some barclamps that are already deployed. This happens because Crowbar will refuse to apply a barclamp to a list of nodes if …