Chapter 1. Using SUSE Cloud Dashboard

Contents

1.1. Requirements
1.2. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Overview
1.3. Managing Projects and Users
1.4. Managing Images
1.5. Managing Flavors
1.6. Setting Quotas

The SUSE® Cloud Dashboard is a Web interface that allows cloud administrators and users to manage various OpenStack services. It is based on OpenStack Dashboard (also known under its codename Horizon).

After a short introduction to the Dashboard, learn how to execute key administration tasks such as managing projects and users, adding images, adding flavors, and setting quotas.

1.1. Requirements

The following requirements need to be fulfilled to access the SUSE Cloud Dashboard:

1.2. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Overview

Learn how to log in to SUSE Cloud Dashboard and get a short overview of its Web interface.

1.2.1. Logging in to the SUSE Cloud Dashboard

To access the SUSE Cloud Dashboard, ask the cloud operator for the following information:

  • Hostname or (public) IP address of the SUSE Cloud Dashboard. (The Dashboard is available on the node that has the nova-dashboard server role.)

  • Username and password of the cloud administrator or cloud user with which you can log in to SUSE Cloud Dashboard.

  1. Start a Web browser and make sure that JavaScript and cookies are enabled.

  2. As a URL, enter the hostname or IP address that you got from the cloud operator.

    https://IP_ADDRESS_OR_HOSTNAME/
    [Note]Certificate Warning

    Depending on your browser and browser options, you may get a certificate warning when trying to access the URL for the first time. (In case no certificate is provided when setting up the Dashboard, SUSE Cloud uses a self-signed certificate that is not considered trustworthy by default).

    In this case, verify the certificate.

    To proceed anyway, you can add an exception in the browser to bypass the warning.

  3. On the SUSE Cloud Dashboard login screen, enter the User Name and Password and click Sign In.

Figure 1.1. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Login Screen

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Login Screen

After logging in, the Dashboard's Main Screen (Administrator's View) appears.

1.2.2. Main Screen (Administrator's View)

The top-level row of the main screen shows the username with which you are logged in. It also allows you to access the Settings or to Sign Out of the Web interface.

[Note]Available Functions

The visible tabs and functions in the Dashboard depend on the access permissions of the user that is logged in. They are defined by roles.

If you are logged in as an administrator, the main screen shows the following tabs: Project and an Admin.

1.2.2.1. Main Screen—Project Tab

The Project tab shows details for the projects (or tenants) that the user who is logged in belongs to.

Figure 1.2. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Project Tab

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Project Tab

Select a Project from the drop-down list on the left-hand side to access the following categories:

Overview

Shows basic reports on the project.

Instances & Volumes

Lists instances and volumes created by users of the project. From here, you can terminate, pause, or reboot any instances or connect to them via VNC.

Images & Snapshots

Lists images and snapshots created by users of the project, plus any images that are publicly available.

Access & Security

Allows to allocate or release floating IP addresses, manage security groups and keypairs.

1.2.2.2. Main Screen—Admin Tab

Figure 1.3. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Admin Tab

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—Admin Tab

On this tab, you can access the following categories:

Overview

Shows basic reports.

Instances

Lists all currently running instances belonging to various users and tenants. (Not all tenants may be visible to the administrator, though.)

Services

Lists the defined services.

Flavors

Lists the available sizes of the VMs that users may launch.

Images

Shows the custom images that have been uploaded. Lets you edit image properties or delete images, if needed.

Project

Lists the available tenants. From here, you can create new projects and assign users to the projects.

Users

Gives an overview of all users.

Quotas

Lists the default quota values (hard-coded in OpenStack Nova). Includes parameters such as the number of CPUs, RAM, or instances.

1.3. Managing Projects and Users

SUSE Cloud allows you to manage projects independently from each other. Projects represent different organizational units in the cloud to which users can be assigned. Both project and user management are cloud administrator's tasks.

During the basic system setup, the cloud operator needs to minimally define one project, one user, and one role to link the project and user. Roles define which actions users are allowed to perform.

As a SUSE Cloud administrator, you can create additional projects and users as needed. The following procedures guide you through the main management tasks like adding, modifying, or deleting projects and users. Learn how to assign users to one or multiple projects, or how to change or remove the assignment.

Procedure 1.1. Creating or Deleting A Project

Projects can be created, deleted, or temporarily disabled by cloud administrators. Disabling a project has the following consequences:

Consequences of Disabling a Project

  • In the SUSE Cloud Dashboard, the project can no longer be accessed from the Project drop-down list on the Project tab.

  • Users that are only members of the disabled project can no longer log in.

  • It is impossible to launch new instances for a disabled project. Instances already running are not automatically terminated though—you have to stop them manually.

  • All data of a disabled project is kept so that the project can be re-enabled at any time.

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Projects category.

  2. To add a new project:

    1. Click Create New Project.

    2. In the window that opens, enter a Name and Description for the project and confirm your changes.

      The Dashboard automatically assigns an ID and shows the newly created project in the Projects category.

  3. To delete one or multiple projects:

    1. Activate the check boxes in front of the projects that you want to delete.

    2. Click Delete Projects and confirm your choice in the pop-up that appears.

      A message on the Web page shows if the action has been successful.

  4. To temporarily deactivate a project: Click Edit Project and deactivate the Enabled check box.

Figure 1.4. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Projects (Administrator's View)

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Projects (Administrator's View)

Procedure 1.2. Creating Or Deleting Users Accounts

Users are members of one or multiple projects. Both project and user management are cloud administrator's tasks. When a new user account is created, the user has to be assigned to a primary project. The user can also be assigned to additional projects.

User accounts can be created, deleted, or temporarily deactivated. If a user account is deactivated, the user can no longer log in, but his data is kept so that the account can be re-enabled at any time. Before a user account can be deleted, the user needs to be removed from his primary project.

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Users category.

  2. To add a new user account:

    1. Click Create User.

    2. In the window that opens, enter a User Name and an Email address for the user.

    3. Set a preliminary Password for the user and confirm it.

    4. Assign the user to a Primary Project by selecting the respective project from the drop-down list.

    5. Confirm your changes.

      The Dashboard automatically assigns an ID and shows the newly created user account in the Users category.

  3. To delete one or multiple users accounts:

    1. Activate the check boxes in front of the user accounts that you want to delete.

    2. Click Delete Users and confirm your choice in the pop-up that appears.

      A message on the Web page shows if the action has been successful.

      [Note]Remove User from Primary Project

      If a user account cannot be deleted, it is because it is still assigned to its primary project.

      1. Edit the user data to view which Primary Project he is assigned to.

      2. Remove the user from his primary project as described in Procedure 1.3, “Modifying User Assignments for a Project”, Step 1 to Step 4.

  4. To temporarily deactivate a user account: Select the user, and from the Actions drop-down list, select Disable.

Figure 1.5. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Users (Administrator's View)

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Users (Administrator's View)

Procedure 1.3. Modifying User Assignments for a Project

When creating new users, you must assign them to a primary project as described in Procedure 1.2, “Creating Or Deleting Users Accounts”. To assign users to additional projects or to modify and remove assignments, proceed as follows:

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Projects category.

  2. Select the project for which to modify user assignments.

  3. From the Actions drop-down list for the project, select Modify Users.

    The Dashboard shows two lists of users: Users For Project shows the users assigned to the current project, Add New Users shows other existing users, which can be assigned to the current project.

  4. To remove users from the current project, select one or multiple users and click Remove User or Remove Users.

  5. To assign a user to the current project:

    1. Select the user and click Add To Project.

    2. In the window that appears, set the user's role with which to add him to the project and click Add. Roles define the actions that the user is allowed to perform. Roles are configured by the cloud operator in OpenStack Identity (Keystone). Actions are defined per OpenStack service in the respective /etc/[SERVICE_CODENAME]/policy.json file, for example in /etc/nova/policy.json for the Compute (Nova) service. For details, refer to http://docs.openstack.org/essex/openstack-compute/install/content/keystone-concepts.html.

1.4. Managing Images

In the SUSE Cloud context, images are virtual disk images that represent the contents and structure of a storage medium or device, such as a hard drive, in a single file. Images are used as a template from which a virtual machine can be started. For starting a virtual machine, SUSE Cloud always uses a copy of the image.

User permissions to manage images are defined by the cloud operator during setup of SUSE Cloud. Image upload and management may be restricted to cloud administrators or cloud operators only.

After uploading an image to Nova, it cannot be changed any more (golden image).

Whereas nearly all key tasks can either be executed from the SUSE Cloud Web interface or from the command line, images can only be uploaded with a command line tool, glance image-create. For details, refer to Section 2.4.2, “Adding Images”.

Images have both contents and meta-data; the latter are also called properties. The following properties can be attached to an image in SUSE Cloud:

Image Properties

Name (--name, optional)

Specifies a name with which the image will be listed in the SUSE Cloud Dashboard and in the command line interface.

Kernel ID (optional)

The image's kernel ID. This parameter is only needed if an external Kernel is associated with the image. The ID points to the Kernel glance image.

Ramdisk ID (optional)

The image's ramdisk ID. This parameter is only needed if an external ramdisk is associated with the image. The ID points to the ramdisk glance image.

Architecture (optional)

The image's architecture.

Container Format (--container-format, optional)

Indicates if the VM image's file format contains metadata about the actual virtual machine. Set it to bare as the container format string is not currently used in any OpenStack components anyway. For details, refer to http://docs.openstack.org/developer/glance/formats.html.

Disk Format (--disk-format, required)

Specifies the image's disk format. Example formats include raw, qcow2, and ami. For details, refer to http://docs.openstack.org/developer/glance/formats.html.

Public (--is-public, optional)

Boolean value, default: false. If set to true, the image is publicly available.

VM Mode (optional)

Specify the hypervisor ABI (application binary interface) with the vm_mode flag. It can take the values pv, hvm, or xen. Use vm_mode=xen for XEN PV image import, or vm_mode=hvm for XEN HVM image import. For KVM, the correct mode is selected automatically.

After images have been added from the command line, they appear in the SUSE Cloud Dashboard on the Admin tab. View them in the Images category. From there, you can also Edit the image properties.

If you need to delete an image, proceed as follows.

Procedure 1.4. Deleting Images

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Images category.

  2. To delete one or multiple images, activate the check boxes in front of the images that you want to delete.

  3. Click Delete Images and confirm your choice in the pop-up that appears.

    A message on the Web page shows if the action has been successful.

1.5. Managing Flavors

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.

A flavor consists of the following parameters:

Flavor Parameters

Flavor ID

Automatically proposed by SUSE Cloud.

Name

Name for the new flavor.

VCPUs

Number of virtual CPUs to use.

Memory MB

Amount of RAM to use (in megabytes).

Root Disk GB

Amount of disk space (in gigabytes) to use for the root (/) partition.

Ephemeral Disk GB

Amount of disk space (in gigabytes) to use for the ephemeral partition. If unspecified, the value is 0 by default.

Ephemeral disks offer machine local disk storage linked to the lifecycle of a VM instance. When a VM is terminated, all data on the ephemeral disk is lost. Ephemeral disks are not included in any snapshots.

Swap

Amount of swap space (in megabytes) to use. If unspecified, the value is 0 by default.

The default flavors are:

Default Flavors

  • m1.tiny (1 VCPU/0 GB Disk/512 MB RAM)

  • m1.smaller (1 VCPU/0 GB Disk/1024 MB RAM)

  • m1.small (1 VCPU/10 GB Disk/2048 MB RAM)

  • m1.medium (2 VCPU/10 GB Disk/3072 MB RAM)

  • m1.large (4 VCPU/10 GB Disk/8192 MB RAM)

  • m1.xlarge (8 VCPU/10 GB Disk/8192 MB RAM)

Via the SUSE Cloud Dashboard, you can create new flavors or delete existing ones.

Procedure 1.5. Creating or Deleting Flavors

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Flavors category.

  2. To create a new flavor:

    1. Click Create Flavor.

    2. In the window that opens, specify the required parameters for the flavor.

    3. Confirm your changes.

      The newly created flavor will appear in the list of flavors and can be used when launching new instances.

  3. To delete one or multiple flavors:

    1. Activate the check boxes in front of the flavors that you want to delete.

    2. Click Delete Flavors and confirm your choice in the pop-up that appears.

      A message on the Web page shows if the action has been successful.

Figure 1.6. SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Flavors (Administrator's View)

SUSE Cloud Dashboard—List of Flavors (Administrator's View)

1.6. Setting Quotas

To prevent system capacities from being exhausted without notification, cloud administrators can set up quotas. In OpenStack, quotas are currently defined per project.

Quotas contain the following parameters:

Quota Parameters

ID (Name)

ID for the quota settings. Automatically proposed by SUSE Cloud.

Metadata Items

Number of metadata items per instance.

Injected Files

Number of injected files.

Injected File Content Bytes

Number of bytes per injected file.

VCPUs

Number of virtual CPUs that can be allocated in total.

Instances

Total number of instances.

Volumes

Total number of volumes.

Gigabytes

Total size of all volumes, measured in gigabytes.

RAM (in MB)

Total RAM size of all instances, measured in megabytes.

Floating IPs

Total number of floating IP addresses.

Security Group Rules

Number of security rules per security group.

Security Groups

Number of security groups.

[Note]Contents of the Quota Category

The Quota category does not allow you to set any values, it just shows the global default quota values that are hard-coded in OpenStack Nova.

Procedure 1.6. Setting Quotas for a Project

  1. On the Admin tab, select the Projects category.

  2. Select the project for which to set or change quota values.

  3. From the Actions drop-down list, select Modify Quota.

    The window that opens shows the default quota values per project, which are hard-coded in OpenStack Nova.

  4. Change the values for the quota parameters as desired.

  5. Confirm your changes.


SUSE Cloud User Guide for Administrators 1.0