openstack team mailing list archive

[Justin Santa Barbara <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm trying to use OpenStack in what I think to be the typical
non-public-cloud deployment, and my experience is not what it
could/should be.  I'm hoping someone can point me to the "right way",
or we can figure out what needs to change.

My wishlist:
* I want my instances to be on "my network" e.g. 10.0.0.0/16
* As Nova can't pull IPs from my DHCP server, I'm willing to allocate
it a sub-range, e.g. 10.200.0.0/16

First decision: Choosing a networking mode:
* I don't want / need VLANs
* If I use FlatDHCPManager, I can't do the subrange stuff - it seems
that this mode assumes it controls the entire address range.
* So it's FlatManager.  It works, but now I don't have DHCP, so I just
have to inject info into the instance.

Next decision: How to inject info (at least the IP address):
* Supposedly the 'right way' is to use cloud-init.  It looks like I'd
still need DHCP before I can reach 169.254..., and I don't have that.
It looks like cloud-init can't do network configuration even if nova
passed the information in.  And I'd be locked into cloud-init images -
no Windows, no Debian etc.
* The next best way is config_drive.  It looks like I'd have to bundle
my own image.  Maybe I could use cloud-init, maybe with an OVF
formatted config_drive, but even then I couldn't configure networking
(?)
* So now I'm back to file injection.  That just works.

So now I'm using FlatManager and file injection; and yet I feel this
is the dodgy back alley of OpenStack, and I should be in the well-lit
nice area.  I worry that things like file injection and FlatManager
are less favored and may be deprecated in future.  But every time I
try to do things "right" I just waste a lot of time and make no
progress.

Yet I feel I didn't really have a choice here.   How are other people
making this work?  What is the "right way"?

Justin