OpenNebula Cloud orchestration with LXD Using OpenNebula's MiniONE (ONE being OpenNebula's acronym for OpenNEbula) - installs in just a few minutes

LXD
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OpenNebula is one of the largest Cloud configuration/orchestration tools used in the world and rivals OpenStack in many ways. However, OpenNebula (to me) is simpler to install, learn and use.

OpenNebula now fully supports LXD as a “first-class” hypervisor alongside KVM, vmware, etc.

They recently introduced MiniONE (ONE being the acronym for OpenNEbula) which is installed entirely in LXD containers.

OpenNebula supports Multi-Cloud (AWS, Azure etc), is by design Multi-Tenant and supports public, private & hybrid cloud orchestration/management.

Although, the document points to installing it on AWS or some cloud you can just as easily install MiniONE on an Ubuntu 18.04 VM !

I just did this yesterday and it took less than 5 minutes on my KVM VM.

Just thought I’d share this in case others might like to try it out themselves.

Here is a short video I made to show how to Install OpenNebula miniONE to use LXD as a Hypervisor and how to create two LXD “VMs” using images from the standard LXD image repository. Its really pretty easy/simple !

You should read the front page of the OpenNebula website to gain an insight into how widely its used and how versatile it can be… and the fact that it can fully utilize LXD with all it does is just icing on the cake to me.

Note: after installing MiniONE there is only 1 default image (centos) but if you click on Storage and then Click on MarketPlace you can select the linuxcontainers.org image server and download & configure any of the normally accessible LXD images (ubuntu, alpine etc).

If you read thru the MiniONE GitHub README it describes how to do all of this.

This may also be useful to people just trying this out for the first time:http://docs.opennebula.org/5.8/operation/network_management/vn_templates.html

Brian

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Very interesting.

Have you tried this (or plan to try) on an LXD cluster?

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I installed this 2 days ago on a local Ubuntu 18.04 KVM VM and so far have 3 LXD container “VMs” deployed (CentOS, Two Ubuntu)… but I’m still in the exploring/learning mode in regards to terminology, functions etc.

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Is this similar to Kubernetes?

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OpenNebula just added a Kubernetes “appliance” to their Marketplace…

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I found out that OpenNebula gives Public Training over the Internet for both Europe and the U.S.

Here are the 2019 Schedules for both Europe and the U.S.

http://opennebula.systems/public-training/

The next training in both areas is Thursday July 11th.

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And … here are some OpenNebula Online Tutorials…

https://opennebula.org/tutorials/

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Here is the presentation at OpenNebula Conference 2018 in Amsterdam - OpenNebula and LXD

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Today I learned I was really overcomplicating things and that creating new LXD “VMs” in OpenNebula is really simple. Defining vCPU (fractional CPU) assignment, min/max memory assignment, storage assignment etc is also really easy. Not that its hard using LXD’s own CLI but this is all done via a nice GUI Management tool (SunStone). Next I’m going to try to see if I can create a cluster of LXD “VMs” in OpenNebula. Note: I don’t think these clusters are the same as the native LXD clusters but I could be wrong. I’ll try to put together a short video to show the steps I’ve learned so far and post that somewhere when I get the time.

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Here is a short video I made to show how to Install OpenNebula miniONE to use LXD as a Hypervisor and how to create two LXD “VMs” using images from the standard LXD image repository. Its really pretty easy/simple !

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Just a small note on miniOne… I’m not sure if it is same with “normal” OpenNebula or just with “miniONE” installation but it seems that it lefts ,by default, VNC console of LXD containers widely opened and unprotected so anyone can access containers.

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Remember you also have to have the Password for miniONE just to get access to the SunStone mgmt gui in order to launch a VM and then the VNC console

AND… although I didn’t show it…
via the GUI you have multiple ACL methods to restrict access to any of the VMs with BOTH owner & group permissions.

That and of course you could create user accounts in any of the running LXD VMs and then pwd the root acct

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OpenNebula Github responded to the issue I opened about how to get miniONE to automatically restart after a reboot of its Host or Host VM requires just a standard systemctl command on the Host or Host VM:

systemctl enable opennebula opennebula-sunstone

After doing that the miniONE environment of OpenNebula and SunStone will automatically restart upon reboot of the Host or Host VM.

FYI… they are also fixing this in the github master branch of the miniONE code so the above is done at installation time in the future.

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Brian, that video does not play for me some reason.
Thanks for input on ON and LXD. Been looking at this closely too.

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Its just an .mkv format video. A application like VLC should play it if you download it and I know several folks have watched it already from their Email comments

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George
I put the same video up on Youtube:

To me… for some reason its not as clear to view, not sure why but you can try that too.

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