Quickstart

Warning

This quickstart quide assumes that you have prepared your system according to the steps documented in the Section Preparation.

Setup

The setup of cloudmesh client is quite simple and can be done with:

pip install cloudmesh_client

However, you may want to read carefully our setup guide and prepare your machine as your OS may not have the required packages installed by default (see: Preparation).

Help

There are many commands in cloudmesh, and you can find out more about them while typing in

help

When locationg a specific command you want to know more about, lets assume you want to know more about the command color, say

help color

Cloudmesh shell

The cloudmesh shell contains a number of simple abstractions. This includes defaults, variables and configuration flags.

To set a default value, for example to set the default cloud to kilo use:

default cloud=kilo

To configure color output of the cloudmesh shell use:

color on

To conduct a live refresh in a cloud please use

refresh on

Accessing Clouds

Naturally you want to get started with clouds. In case you have a username and project in futuresystems using cloudmesh is easy. Only thing you need is an entry in the .ssh/config file with the machine name india, like follows:

Host india
Hostname india.futuresystems.org
User albert

Next you can register the cloud(s) with:

register remote

This will fetch the necessary credentials from the cloud, and poplulate the cloudmesh.yaml file for you. At this time it will create an entry for a cloud named kilo.

If you need to view the flavors and images in the cloud, use:

image refresh
flavor refresh

To list the images/flavors use the following:

list image
list flavor

To set default flavor and image use:

default image=Ubuntu 14.04
default flavor=m1.tiny

You also need to set your default group. If you already have a group created you can use that or else you can specify a new group name.

default group=test-group

Next, you need to upload your ssh keys to the cloud. If you already have a key-pair you can use it, or else you can generate ssh keys using:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C albert@albert-pc

This will generate id_rsa.pub (public key) and id_rsa (private key) in the ~/.ssh/ directory.

First step (in the process of uploading key to cloud), is to add this key to the key database. To do so, use:

key add --ssh --name=id_rsa

You can list the keys in the key database by using:

key list

The output would look something like:

+--------+----------------+-------------------------------------+--------------+--------+
| name   | comment        | uri                                 | fingerprint  | source |
+--------+----------------+-------------------------------------+--------------+--------+
| id_rsa | albert@mycompi | file:///home/albert/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | 64:aa: ....  | ssh    |
+--------+----------------+-------------------------------------+--------------+--------+

Then, to upload this key to the cloud (your default cloud) use:

key upload albert_ssh_key

Virtual Machines

If you have followed this document till this point, you are all set to start a new VM in the cloud. This section explains how to do that.

First, make sure all defaults are correctly set.

vm default

The output will look somewhat similar to the following:

+-----------+---------------+
| Attribute | Value         |
+-----------+---------------+
| secgroup  |               |
| name      | albert-001    |
| image     | Ubuntu 14.04  |
| cloud     | kilo          |
| group     | test-group    |
| key       | id_rsa        |
| flavor    | m1.tiny       |
| login_key |               |
+-----------+---------------+
info. OK.

Starting a VM now is as simple as executing a single command.

vm boot

This will start up a new VM in your default cloud. You need to refresh the database before listing VMs.

vm refresh
vm list

The output will look something like follows:

+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+
| id | uuid         | label      | status | static_ip | floating_ip | key_name | project | user   | cloud |
+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+
| 47 | 8af4177f-... | albert-001 | ACTIVE | 10.0.2.37 |             | id_rsa   | fg478   | albert | kilo  |
+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+

Congratulations! you have now learnt how to set up cloudmesh, and use it to start a VM. Next step naturally is to login to the virtual machine. To do so, we need to assign it a public IP (also called floating IP).

To associate a floating ip to an instance (albert-001) in our case, use:

network associate floating ip --instance=albert-001

Listing VMs will now show you this floating ip:

vm list

+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+--------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+
| id | uuid         | label      | status | static_ip | floating_ip  | key_name | project | user   | cloud |
+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+--------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+
| 47 | 8af4177f-... | albert-001 | ACTIVE | 10.0.2.37 | 152.25.6.101 | id_rsa   | fg478   | albert | kilo  |
+----+--------------+------------+--------+-----------+--------------+----------+---------+--------+-------+

Next, you need to set your login key to be able to ssh to the VM. This will be the path to the private key (id_rsa) corresponding to the public key we uploaded to the cloud:

default login_key=~/.ssh/id_rsa

Logging into the cloud is now as simple as:

vm login albert-001

This should get you through to the ssh session to the VM. Congratulations! You have now learnt how to start a new VM and log into a VM.

To delete a VM, you use:

vm delete albert-001

HPC

IN order to use the HPC experiment management functionality, you must register the queuing system in the yaml file and register the login node in the .ssh/config file. If you are using india and have used the clouds before, you may have already done this.

To start a command such as uname and execute a command you can say:

run uname

It will print a job number that you may use to interact with the system further to for example list the output

run list 101

(We assume here 101 is your job id)

To see the status and the output you can say

run status 101
run output 101