OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook

The examples in the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook assumes you have a suitable messaging service backend configured to run the OpenStack services. This didn’t fit with any single chapter or service as nearly all rely on something like RabbitMQ. If you don’t have this installed, follow these steps which you should be able to copy and paste to run in your environment. Warning: The steps below do not assume security best practices as we allow the guest user to connect in our environment from any of our OpenStack services.

Getting ready

We will be performing an installation and configuration of RabbitMQ on the Controller node that is shown in the diagram. There are other messaging systems that are available for use with OpenStack such as QPID and ZeroMQ, but we concentrate on the most widely used which is RabbitMQ. In the examples through the book, the IP address of the Controller that this will be on, and will be used by the services in the book, will be 172.16.0.200.

OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook Lab Environment

How to do it…

To install RabbitMQ, carry out the following steps

Tip: A script is provided here for you to run the commands below

1. We install the required packages with the following command

   sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server

2. We then create a very simple config file that allows guest users to connect remotely with the following

   cat > /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config <<EOF
   [{rabbit, [{loopback_users, []}]}].
   EOF

3. And then we set RabbitMQ to listen on port 5672

   cat > /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf <<EOF
   RABBITMQ_NODE_PORT=5672
   EOF

4. We pick up the changes made by restarting RabbitMQ with the following command

   service rabbitmq-server restart

How it works…

What we have done here is install and configure RabbitMQ on our Controller node that is hosted with address 172.16.0.200. When we configure our OpenStack services that required a RabbitMQ connection, they will use the the following format:

rabbit_host = 172.16.0.200
rabbit_port = 5672
rabbit_use_ssl = false
rabbit_userid = guest
rabbit_password = guest
rabbit_virtual_host = /