Create a Virtual Machine from command line in STFC Openstack

It’s common to want to create VMs from command line. To do this, you need to be on a host that has the openstack command line interface installed.

On Ubuntu machines, we can simply install the client by running:

Setting up the environment to select project

After logging into a host, you have to set your environment variables.

Please download the openrc script to set these up for you, from: https://openstack.stfc.ac.uk/project/api_access/openrc/

You will need to be signed in to the project you wish to use in the OpenStack web interface for this to work.

Finding images

A full detailed list of images is available on our Confluence: Image Types.

Current images can also be listed on the command line with openstack. Run:-

Finding flavors

A full detailed list of flavors is available on our Confluence: Flavors.

Current flavors can also be listed on the command line with openstack. Run:-

Networks

To see the list of networks available, run the command:-

…this returns two networks named “External” and “Internal”. Since we can’t add VMs directly to External network, we will be using the “Internal” network.

Create a new Instance

Please see the openstack documentation for the full set of parameters: https://docs.openstack.org/python-openstackclient/latest/cli/command-objects/server.html#server-create

Here is an example command, putting together information from the previous commands:-

To delete a host, you can use the command:-

You can also run with --debug after the openstack command – this will give you a step by step commentary as to what is happening when creating a virtual machine. For example:-

References

The following is a good generic guide:- https://docs.openstack.org/install-guide/launch-instance-provider.html