Preparing the Host Cloud Environment¶

Build or download an ipxe-boot image for the baremetal instances.
1. To download a pre-built image:
```
wget https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/openstack-m/ovb/ipxe-boot.qcow2
```
2. To build the image, run the following from the root of the OVB repo:
```
make -C ipxe
```
  To install the required build dependencies on a Fedora system:
```
sudo dnf install -y make gcc perl xz-devel genisoimage qemu-img
```
Source an rc file that will provide admin credentials for the host cloud.
Upload an ipxe-boot image for the baremetal instances:
```
glance image-create --name ipxe-boot --disk-format qcow2 --property os_shutdown_timeout=5 --container-format bare < ipxe/ipxe-boot.qcow2
```
Note

The path provided to ipxe-boot.qcow2 is relative to the root of the OVB repo. If the command is run from a different working directory, the path will need to be adjusted accordingly.

Note

os_shutdown_timeout=5 is to avoid server shutdown delays since since these servers won’t respond to graceful shutdown requests.

Note

On a UEFI enabled openstack cloud, to boot the baremetal instances with uefi (instead of the default bios firmware) the image should be created with the parameters –property=”hw_firmware_type=uefi”.

Upload a CentOS 7 image for use as the base image:

wget http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2

glance image-create --name CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare < CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2

(Optional) Create a pre-populated base BMC image. This is a CentOS 7 image with the required packages for the BMC pre-installed. This eliminates one potential point of failure during the deployment of an OVB environment because the BMC will not require any external network resources:
```
wget https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/openstack-m/ovb/bmc-base.qcow2

glance image-create --name bmc-base --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare < bmc-base.qcow2
```
To use this image, configure bmc_image in env.yaml to be bmc-base instead of the generic CentOS 7 image.
Create recommended flavors:
```
nova flavor-create baremetal auto 8192 50 2
nova flavor-create bmc auto 512 20 1
```
These flavors can be customized if desired. For large environments with many baremetal instances it may be wise to give the bmc flavor more memory. A 512 MB BMC will run out of memory around 20 baremetal instances.
Source an rc file that will provide user credentials for the host cloud.

Add a Nova keypair to be injected into instances:

nova keypair-add --pub-key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub default

(Optional) Configure quotas. When running in a dedicated OVB cloud, it may be helpful to set some quotas to very large/unlimited values to avoid running out of quota when deploying multiple or large environments:

neutron quota-update --security_group 1000
neutron quota-update --port -1
neutron quota-update --network -1
neutron quota-update --subnet -1
nova quota-update --instances -1 --cores -1 --ram -1 [tenant uuid]