Using a vSphere Datastore as Backing for OpenStack Glance Image Catalog

This Tutorial describes steps required for setting up a vSphere Datastore as a backing for your OpenStack Glance Image Catalog in Platform9 Managed OpenStack.

Set Up OpenStack Glance:

• Enabling Glance datastore feature requires authorization of VMware gateway by specifying the datastore and appliance IP that should to be paired with Platform9 Glance.

• Exactly one datastore can be paired with Platform9 Glance.
• Any glance commands must be executed from a machine that can access the gateway.

How it Works:

Once the initial setup is complete, all Glance operations will use the VMware datastore as the backend.

• Templates, however will be discovered based on the datastores paired with Nova.
• Image upload to the datastore is an HTTP PUT on the datastore directly and does not invoke any vCenter operation.
• Datastores paired with Nova Compute and Glance need not be the same.
• All glance images can be found at /pf9/openstack_glance path on the Glance datastore.

Using OpenStack Glance Command Line:

Glance command line client can be used to perform image operations to datastores. Below are few examples.

• Creating an image:
  Two Platform9 specific properties need to be specified for the uploading the image, ie., pf9_virtual_size and pf9_description. pf9_virtual_size is the virtual size of the image and pf9_description is optional. Additionally, the property vmware_ostype should be specified correctly, especially for Windows OSes. You can refer to the list of supported VMware OS types here. If you have more than 1 region in your Platform9 deployment, you will also need to specify the region via the –os-region-name parameter.

glance image-create \

[--os-region-name <Region Name>] \

--name cirros \

--file /path/to/image/filename.vmdk \

--container-format=bare \

--disk-format=vmdk \

--property vmware_disktype="preallocated" \

--property vmware_adaptertype="ide" \

--property pf9_virtual_size="40894464" \

--property vmware_ostype="otherGuest64" \

--property pf9_description="glance cmdline image upload"

List Images:

glance image-list

Display properties of an image:

glance image-show <image-id>

Delete image:

glance image-delete <image-id>