Chapter 7. Configuring a Basic Overcloud with the Web UI

Users access the director’s web UI through SSL. For example, if the IP address of your undercloud is 192.168.24.1, then the address to access the UI is https://192.168.24.1. The web UI initially presents a login screen with fields for the following:

When logging in to the UI, the UI accesses the OpenStack Identity Public API and obtains the endpoints for the other Public API services. These services include

The UI provides three main sections:

These validation tasks run automatically at certain points in the deployment. However, you can also run them manually. Click the Play button for a validation task you want to run. Click the title of each validation task to run it, or click a validation title to view more information about it.

The director UI requires a plan before configuring the overcloud. This plan is usually a Heat template collection, like the one on your undercloud at /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates. In addition, you can customize the plan to suit your hardware and environment requirements. For more information about customizing the overcloud, see the Advanced Overcloud Customization guide.

The plan displays four main steps to configuring your overcloud:

The undercloud installation and configuration automatically uploads a plan. You can also import multiple plans in the web UI. Click on the All Plans breadcrumb on the Plan screen. This displays the current Plans listing. Change between multiple plans by clicking on a card.

Click Import Plan and a window appears asking you for the following information:

If you need to copy the director’s Heat template collection to a client machine, archive the files and copy them:

$ cd /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/
$ tar -cf ~/overcloud.tar *
$ scp ~/overcloud.tar user@10.0.0.55:~/.

Once the director UI uploads the plan, the plan appears in the Plans listing and you can now configure it. Click on the plan card of your choice.

The first step in configuring the overcloud is to register your nodes. Start the node registration process either through:

This displays the Register Nodes window.

The director requires a list of nodes for registration, which you can supply using one of two methods:

The details you need to provide for manual registration include the following:

After entering your node information, click Register Nodes at the bottom of the window.

The director registers the nodes. Once complete, you can use the UI to perform introspection on the nodes.

The director UI can run an introspection process on each node. This process causes each node to boot an introspection agent over PXE. This agent collects hardware data from the node and sends it back to the director. The director then stores this introspection data in the OpenStack Object Storage (swift) service running on the director. The director uses hardware information for various purposes such as profile tagging, benchmarking, and manual root disk assignment.

To start the introspection process:

Once the introspection process completes, select all nodes with the Provision State set to manageable then click the Provide Nodes button. Wait until the Provision State changes to available.

The nodes are now ready to tag and provision.

You can assign a set of profiles to each node. Each profile corresponds to a respective flavor and roles (see Section 6.5, “Tagging Nodes into Profiles” for more information).

The Nodes screen includes an additional menu toggle that provides extra node management actions, such as Tag Nodes.

To tag a set of nodes:

The Plan screen provides a method to customize your uploaded plan. Under 2 Specify Deployment Configuration, click the Edit Configuration link to modify your base overcloud configuration.

A window appears with two main tabs:

At the bottom-right corner of the Configure Roles and Assign Nodes section is a Manage Roles icon.

Clicking this icon displays a selection of cards representing available roles to add to your environment. To add a role, mark the checkbox in the role’s top-right corner.

Once you have selected your roles, click Save Changes.

After registering and inspecting the hardware of each node, you assign them into roles from your plan.

To assign nodes to a role, scroll to the 3 Configure Roles and Assign Nodes section on the Plan screen. Each role uses a spinner widget to assign the number of nodes to a role. The available nodes per roles are based on the tagged nodes in Section 7.6, “Tagging Nodes into Profiles in the Web UI”.

This changes the *Count parameter for each role. For example, if you change the number of nodes in the Controller role to 3, this sets the ControllerCount parameter to 3. You can also view and edit these count values in the Parameters tab of the deployment configuration. See Section 7.7, “Editing Overcloud Plan Parameters in the Web UI” for more information.

Each node role provides a method for configuring role-specific parameters. Scroll to 3 Configure Roles and Assign Nodes roles on the Plan screen. Click the Edit Role Parameters icon next to the role name.

A window appears that shows two main tabs:

Once the overcloud plan is configured, you can start the overcloud deployment. This involves scrolling to the 4 Deploy section and clicking Validate and Deploy.

If you have not run or passed all the validations for the undercloud, a warning message appears. Make sure that your undercloud host satisfies the requirements before running a deployment.

When you are ready to deploy, click Deploy.

The UI regularly monitors the progress of the overcloud’s creation and display a progress bar indicating the current percentage of progress. The View detailed information link displays a log of the current OpenStack Orchestration stacks in your overcloud.

Wait until the overcloud deployment completes.

After the overcloud creation process completes, the 4 Deploy section displays the current overcloud status and the following details:

Use this information to access your overcloud.

This concludes the creation of the overcloud through the director’s UI. For post-creation functions, see Chapter 9, Performing Tasks after Overcloud Creation.