Open Stack

Hi Mike,

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 11:39:59AM -0400, Mike Spreitzer wrote:
> Many of the templates in the heat-templates project have built-in 
> expectations of image names; here is an example excerpt:
> 
>     F18: {'32': F18-i386-cfntools, '64': F18-x86_64-cfntools}
>     F17: {'32': F17-i386-cfntools, '64': F17-x86_64-cfntools}
>     U10: {'32': U10-i386-cfntools, '64': U10-x86_64-cfntools}
>     RHEL-6.1: {'32': rhel61-i386-cfntools, '64': rhel61-x86_64-cfntools}
>     RHEL-6.2: {'32': rhel62-i386-cfntools, '64': rhel62-x86_64-cfntools}
>     RHEL-6.3: {'32': rhel63-i386-cfntools, '64': rhel63-x86_64-cfntools}
> 
> From where should a user get these images?  I have discovered --- I do not 
> even remember how --- that there are some images with names like those in 
> http://fedorapeople.org/groups/heat/prebuilt-jeos-images/ .  Is that the 
> right source?  Is that documented anywhere?

The list of images in the templates is a historical thing - IMO if the
template is in a distro-specific sub-directory, it should only specify the
version related to the directory, e.g "F20", they should not have a list
like you reference.

Those images you link are mostly legacy and deprecated (F17 and F18 are
very EOL), so while that link _was_ documented, it's not anymore:

http://docs.openstack.org/developer/heat/getting_started/on_devstack.html

As you have identified, we've got a lot of outdated stuff in the template
repo, everything needs to be re-tested and moved to the current stable
Fedora release, e.g F20. Help appreciated!

There are more Fedora examples than for other distros, just because that's
what a lot of the contributing developers were most regularly using.  If
folks can contribute better examples for other images, then great :)

One thing to mention however, IMO we want to focus on providing plenty of
good template usage examples, i.e to supplement the documentation and allow
folks to build their own templates, not necessarily the most universally
compatible templates (multi-distro compatibility==template complexity).

> That directory contains only Fedora images.  From where are we expected to 
> get the Ubuntu and RHEL images?

The top level docs cover this:

http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/ch_obtaining_images.html

Maybe we need some docs addition which explains the optional requirement
for heat-cfntools.

> That directory does not contain Fedora 20 images.  Should they be added? I 
> am willing to do the work if that is the right thing to do; how would I 
> create those images?

No, happily heat-cfntools is now included in the official Fedora cloud
image, so you can just download that :)

http://cloud.fedoraproject.org/fedora-20.x86_64.qcow2

> Do we still need to build special images?  Recent releases of Ubuntu and 
> Fedora have cloud-init built in; I assume the same is true for RHEL.

cloud-init was not the reason for the special images, a lot of templates
originally expected heat-cfntools to be in the image (a lot still do).

If you write your templates to avoid using the heat-cfntools agents, it's
perfectly possible to use a generic image, provided it contains cloud-init
(which all of the distributor provided cloud images do AFAIK).

See, for example the *Native examples:

https://github.com/openstack/heat-templates/blob/master/hot/F20/WordPress_Native.yaml

> What are good date-independent URLs for recent Fedora releases?  Steve 
> Hardy has mentioned http://cloud.fedoraproject.org/fedora-20.x86_64.qcow2 
> (and the obvious parallels for release 19 and for 32 bits also exist); I 
> know of no other date-independent URLs for Fedora 19 and 20.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#clouds

Everyone should use the official F20 cloud image unless they have a
specific reason not to (assuming they want to use Fedora).

> For releases that have cloud-init built in, should the templates expect 
> image names that are derived in the obvious way from the date-independent 
> URL?

We should use the default name that devstack uses in glance, IMO, e.g

"fedora-20.x86_64"

I guess that is derived from the URL, so yes :)

> http://fedorapeople.org/groups/heat/prebuilt-jeos-images/F19-x86_64-cfntools.qcow2 
> seems to be broken; I get failures every time I try to use it.  Has 
> anybody had success with it?  Following is an example failure I found in 

It worked last time I used it, but I reccomend just using the F20 image,
I've been using that every day for weeks and it works fine.

The error looks like you have a corrupt or incomplete image FWIW.

Steve