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[OpenStack] User Registration and Basic Usage

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Long Zhang edited this page Apr 23, 2021 · 1 revision

ERDC (The Ericsson Research Data Centre) provides OpenStack services to WASP students, faculty, and projects. We use this page to document how to use the provided OpenStack projects to help your research experiments.

User Registration

It is not possible to self-register an account on this OpenStack platform. In order to use the cloud resources, please fill this Google form and email Long Zhang longz@kth.se about your user registration request.

Basic Usage

After receiving your OpenStack account, you can log into the system via https://xerces.ericsson.net (domain xerces). By default, you will see a summary of your cloud resources. Now you can take the following steps to create your first instance. To watch these steps above in a video demo, you can visit https://youtu.be/1jx88GU6SvQ.

  1. On the left of the page, choose Compute -> Instances and then click the Launch Instance button on the right side.[video]
  2. Specify a name for the instance, and click Next.
  3. On the Source tab you will decide which operating system the instance uses, and how much storage the OS volume has. For example, let's use 50GB for volume size, and pick up Ubuntu 20.04.[video]
  4. On the Flavor tab you will choose the size of this computing instance: how many virtual CPU cores and how much memory.[video]
  5. On the Networks tab, by default you only have one option which is internet. This means that the created instance will be directly connected to the external Internet. In this case, the instance also gets a public IP address.[video]
  6. On the Security Groups tab, you need to add your instance into at least one security group. A security group defines the network policies for the instance. For example, if you want to use ssh to interact with the instance, you need to open the ssh service port 22 in your security group configuration. This can be done later after creating the instance.[video]
  7. On the Key Pair tab, a key pair that is used to log into the instance will be created. As the first time setup, click Create Key Pair, enter a name and choose SSH Key as the key type. Then click Create Keypair and copy-paste the generated private key into a file on your host: [video]
# For example, save the private key into ~/.ssh/openstack.pem
# Then you need to restrict the access of that file (read-only for your username)
$chmod 400 ~/.ssh/openstack.pem
  1. For the rest of the four tabs, you can leave them as the default setup. Click Launch Instance and wait a little bit, you will see your instance on the same page. A public IP address should appear in the IP Address column.
  2. Visit page Network -> Security Groups, you can either modify the default security group or create a new security group and put your instance into that group (On the Instances page, use the drop-down menu on the right side and choose Edit Security Groups). Usually you need to open the ssh port (22 by default). If you are going to run some HTTP services, port 80 and 443 will be needed as well. [video]
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