Installing the Storage Made Easy EFSS Cloud Appliance on OpenStack Glance

This post outlines how to install the Storage Made Easy private Enterprise File Share and Sync Cloud Appliance on OpenStack Glance infrastructure.

The SME Appliance is provide in VMWARE and OVF format by default.

To deploy the appliance without any changes you will first need to convert the appliance to qcow2 file format.

To do this first download the tools:

http://wiki.qemu.org/

Next download and un-compress the SME OVF appliance from the link provided. You will be converting the vmdk file that is part of the SME distribution to qcow2:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 -o compat=0.10 vmdkimagename SMEV2.7.qcow2

e.g.

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 -o compat=0.10 SMEV2.7.vmdk SMEV2.7.qcow2

You can now upload the qcow2 file to OpenStack Compute and start the instance from the image.

Make sure you pass the following meta-value property before starting the SME appliance

hw_disk_bus=ide

Tighter Integration:

You can also prepare the SME appliance to use virtual drivers before converting to qcow2. To do this you will need to take the following steps:

As root user in the SME Appliance run the command to enable Virtio drivers.

(Virtio is a virtualization standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest’s device driver “knows” it is running in a virtual environment)

mkinitrd --with virtio_pci --with virtio_blk -f /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Glance has the ability to store arbitrary metadata properties against images. This provides a way to let the user request specific hardware models, IP address etc. To Install the packages required to fetch meta-data:

yum install cloud-init

Configure meta-service:

edit /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg and change

user:ec2-user to
user:smeconfiguser

To access the metadata service, disable the default zeroconf route:

echo "NOZEROCONF=yes" >> /etc/sysconfig/network

Install the ACPI service and configure it to start when the system boots:

yum install acpid
chkconfig acpid on

You can now convert the image to qcow2 and start an instance please note you must setup key-pair and associate with the started instance.

When configuring the hostname and setting SSL certificates please make sure you do not set the IP address.

To register for a SME Enterprise Trial please visit the trial page.

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