This is the multi-page printable view of this section. Click here to print.

Return to the regular view of this page.

Blog

This is the blog section. It has two categories: News and Releases.

Files in these directories will be listed in reverse chronological order.

News About EucaStack

Eucalyptus 5 FastStart Ansible Playbook

A new Ansible based FastStart install for single host Eucalyptus clouds is now available for early access to Eucalyptus 5 pre-releases.

A FastStart deployment requires a CentOS 7.5-7.7 host with 16G memory and 100G disk as the recommended host minimums. Ansible FastStart installs Eucalyptus with Walrus object storage, overlay block storage, and vpcmido network mode. The deployment is from Eucalyptus 5 nightly builds, so will always have the latest pre-release functionality.

FastStart install

To install Eucalyptus 5 using the Ansible FastStart run (as root):

> bash <(curl -Ls https://go.euca.me/5eav)

The interactive installer will check system prerequisites and prompt for the one required configuration item, the VPC public IP address CIDR. Currently the installer requires between a /24 (~256 addresses) and a /28 (~16 addresses) block, for example:

  • 192.168.100.0/24 for addresses 192.168.100.1 - 192.168.100.254
  • 192.168.1.128/25 for addresses 192.168.1.129 - 192.168.1.254
  • 192.168.2.192/26 for addresses 192.168.2.193 - 192.168.2.254
  • 192.168.3.224/27 for addresses 192.168.3.225 - 192.168.3.254
  • 192.168.4.240/28 for addresses 192.168.4.241 - 192.168.4.254

If the target hosts IP was 10.20.30.40/24 then the CIDR used could be 10.20.30.240/28.

These addresses should not currently be in use, they will be used by instances in the deployment.

Post install

Once the installation completes a few configuration items are listed as next steps. You could install machine images (ami/emi) using the new wrapper script:

> eucalyptus-images

or get started with the management console by configuring the administrator login:

> euare-useraddloginprofile --as-account eucalyptus -u admin -p PASSWORD

The installer also sets up the AWS CLI for use with Eucalyptus:

>
> aws s3 ls
2020-03-07 00:46:33 eucalyptus-service-image-v5.0.100
>
> aws ec2 describe-availability-zones
AVAILABILITYZONES	cloud-1	available	cloud-1a
>
> aws ec2 describe-account-attributes
ACCOUNTATTRIBUTES	supported-platforms
ATTRIBUTEVALUES	VPC
ACCOUNTATTRIBUTES	default-vpc
ATTRIBUTEVALUES	vpc-6b1e517c04915806c
>

You might want to review the Eucalyptus 5 beta 1 announcement for more details on the release.

Feedback

Please report any issues you find with the installer or Eucalyptus 5 to help improve the final release.

Announcing the AWS CLI plugin for Eucalyptus

A new AWS CLI plugin with support for Eucalyptus Cloud deployments is now available.

The initial release of the plugin simplifies using the AWS CLI with your cloud deployment by removing the need to specify the endpoint with each command or using other plugins with more complex configuration.

Getting started

To get started with the plugin, the first step is installation.

You can either install using the pypi package:

> pip install awscli-plugin-eucalyptus

or if using a Eucalyptus 5 early access release then you can install the RPM package:

> yum install eucalyptus-awscli-plugin

Either way, the plugin will be installed and ready to for the next step.

Configuration tells the AWS CLI to use the new plugin and also controls which profiles it is active for.

The simplest approach is to enable for the default profile:

> cat .aws/config 
[plugins]
eucalyptus = awscli_plugin_eucalyptus

[default]
ufshost = euca-10-10-10-10.euca.me
ufsport = 8773
verify_ssl = yes
output = text
region = eucalyptus

The ufshost identifies the domain for the cloud and is used along with other configuration settings to derive the service endpoints such as https://ec2.euca-10-10-10-10.euca.me:8773/.

Change verify_ssl to no if your Eucalyptus deployment does not have a valid HTTPS certificate.

Using the CLI

Once configured you can use the AWS CLI as you would against AWS:

> aws ec2 describe-availability-zones
AVAILABILITYZONES	cloud-1	available	cloud-1a

Next steps

As covered in the earlier post on using the AWS CLI with Eucalyptus you can set up command completion for the AWS CLI:

> complete -C aws_completer aws

which makes it easier to discover commands and their options.

Thanks!

Thanks for giving the AWS CLI plugin for Eucalyptus a try and please use github issues to report any problems you encounter to help improve the plugin.

Using the AWS CLI with Eucalyptus

The AWS Command Line Interface is a unified tool to manage AWS services. You would use the CLI to run EC2 instances, upload objects for storage in S3, and to manage users in IAM.

In this post we examine how the CLI, and higher level tooling, can be used with your Eucalyptus cloud.

Get started with the CLI

The first step is to get the latest AWS CLI. These instructions will differ depending on your OS, we will assume that CentOS/RHEL 7 is in use as that is the OS used with Eucalyptus. You may need to alter for your package manager, or to use pip3 rather than pip.

The AWS CLI can be installed using pip, if you do not have pip available you can install it using yum (or apt-get, dnf, etc):

> yum install python-pip
>
> pip install awscli

We then need to configure a few options to allow use of the CLI with Eucalyptus clouds:

> aws configure set s3.signature_version s3v4
> aws configure set region eucalyptus
> aws configure set output text

We’ve used the region name eucalyptus, but you can use any region name for your Eucalyptus cloud. We set the output of the CLI to text rather than the JSON default so it is easier to read.

The CLI comes with support for TAB completion of commands let’s enable it for our current shell:

> complete -C aws_completer aws

With this configuration we can run commands by specifying the --endpoint option and using credentials from the environment. This is not very convenient, but fortunately we can do better by making use of the endpoint plugin.

Enter the Endpoint plugin

The AWS CLI Endpoint plugin can also be installed using pip and allows us to configure the service endpoints we want to use for our Eucalyptus cloud.

> pip install awscli-plugin-endpoint
>
> aws configure set plugins.endpoint awscli_plugin_endpoint

This installs and enables the plugin.

Next we configure the endpoints, making use of a euca2ools command to generate environment variables based on euca2ools existing configuration:

> eval $(euca-generate-environment-config)
>
> aws configure set autoscaling.endpoint_url ${AWS_AUTO_SCALING_URL}
> aws configure set cloudformation.endpoint_url ${AWS_CLOUDFORMATION_URL}
> aws configure set cloudwatch.endpoint_url ${AWS_CLOUDWATCH_URL}
> aws configure set ec2.endpoint_url ${EC2_URL}
> aws configure set elb.endpoint_url ${AWS_ELB_URL}
> aws configure set iam.endpoint_url ${AWS_IAM_URL}
> aws configure set s3.endpoint_url ${S3_URL}
> aws configure set s3api.endpoint_url ${S3_URL}
> aws configure set sts.endpoint_url ${TOKEN_URL}

Here we have configured the default endpoints used by the various AWS CLI subcommands. A subcommand is a little different from a service, notably we configure the Eucalyptus S3 endpoint for the s3 and s3api subcommands as these both use S3 compatible services.

AWS CLI in action

Now that the CLI is fully configured let’s try out a few of the services:

> aws ec2 describe-account-attributes
ACCOUNTATTRIBUTES	supported-platforms
ATTRIBUTEVALUES	EC2
ACCOUNTATTRIBUTES	default-vpc
ATTRIBUTEVALUES	none
>
> aws iam list-users
USERS	arn:aws:iam::000855590299:user/narwhal	2018-07-08T01:37:46.321Z	/	AIDAAMZJOPZULQOJTH5F5	narwhal
USERS	arn:aws:iam::000855590299:user/walrus	2018-07-08T01:37:22.949Z	/	AIDAAWRRN2HWUF3DKLQFP	walrus
USERS	arn:aws:iam::000855590299:user/admin	2018-07-08T01:36:29.632Z	/	AIDAAX6G7F7VLGONP3LJK	admin
>
> aws s3 ls
2018-07-07 18:39:04 narwhal
2018-07-07 18:39:15 walrus
>
> aws sts get-caller-identity
000855590299	arn:aws:iam::000855590299:user/admin	AIDAAX6G7F7VLGONP3LJK
>

This shows examples of using the ec2, s3, and iam services without having to specify the endpoint for each command.

Using the shell

Now that we have the basics working we can try out the AWS CLI shell

> pip install aws-shell

The shell uses the AWS CLI and provides additional functionality such as command completion and inline documentation.

SVG animation, see more examples on the aws-shell site

As shown here, the shell provides a more interactive experience.

All the clouds

The basic configuration we have so far is a good start, but if you use multiple Eucalyptus clouds, or if use both AWS and Eucalyptus you may need more control over your credentials and endpoints.

AWS CLI profiles offer a solution. When exporting the euca2ools configuration you can use the --region option for euca-generate-environment-config to select the credentials and endpoints for export. You then use the --profile option with the CLI:

> aws --profile euca-profile-1 configure
> 
> eval $(euca-generate-environment-config --region euca-region-1)
>
> aws configure --profile euca-profile-1 set s3.endpoint_url ${S3_URL}
> aws configure --profile euca-profile-1 set s3api.endpoint_url ${S3_URL}

The initial configure command will interactively configure the region and credentials to use for the profile. The endpoint configuration will then set up the endpoints for the profile, above we only show configuration for the S3 endpoint.

If you have any issues with this configuration you may need to remove the [plugins] section from the ~/.aws/config file. If you do so, be sure to add it back in once the endpoints are configured.

With this configuration you can now specify the profile to use for each command or you can switch between CLI profiles by setting an environment variable:

> aws --profile euca-profile-1 s3 ls
>
> export AWS_PROFILE=euca-profile-1
> aws s3 ls

Using this approach to configuration you can more easily use the AWS CLI with both AWS and multiple Eucalyptus clouds.

New Releases

Eucalyptus 5.1 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 5.1 has been released with important compatibility and functionality fixes and is recommended for all 5.x deployments.

Fixes of note in this release are:

  • CloudFormation AWS::IAM::InstanceProfile add InstanceProfileName property
  • ELB cannot connect to https listener
  • S3 support for multipart copy
  • Web services HTTPS (TLS) should use larger ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key size

You can find the full list of resolved issues in the release notes / milestones.

Eucalyptus 5 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 5 is now available, this major release includes a new Ansible based installer and technical previews for Route53 and SQS (Simple Queue Service)

In addition to the headline features, there are many smaller changes to improve the AWS compatibility and performance of Eucalyptus Cloud.

New in Eucalyptus 5

Some new features in Eucalyptus 5 are:

  • Ansible installer
  • Auto Scaling instance protection
  • CloudFormation support for YAML templates
  • EC2 iam instance profile association
  • EC2 long resource identifiers
  • Route53 service technical preview
  • S3 bucket policy support
  • SQS service technical preview

Other notable changes in Eucalyptus 5 are:

  • Cluster controller now part of main cloud service
  • Java runtime updated to version 11
  • Reporting service removed

Full details of changes in Eucalyptus 5 are available in the Corymbia github project and milestone

Try Eucalyptus 5

You can try Eucalyptus 5 with a FastStart install by running:

> bash <(curl -Ls https://get.eucalyptus.cloud)

as root, on a CentOS/RHEL 7.9 minimal install with a few IP addresses to spare.

Miss Eucalyptus 4.4.x?

Eucalyptus 5 look a little different from 4.4.x due to changes with instance types and long identifiers. If you want to try Eucalyptus 5 but with a 4.4.x feel, you can make changes as follows.

To disable EC2 long identifiers, run the following as an administrator:

> euctl cloud.short_identifier_prefixes='*'

changing this setting will cause any new resources to be created with short identifiers (where supported). You can have a mix of short and long identifiers depending on settings when those resources were created.

To change instance types to be the same as 4.4.x, run the following as an administrator:

> euform-create-stack \
  --template-file /usr/share/eucalyptus/doc/ec2-instance-types-eucalyptus-4.yaml \
  eucalyptus-4-instance-types
> euctl cloud.vmtypes.default_type_name=m1.medium
> euctl services.imaging.worker.instance_type=m1.medium
> euctl services.loadbalancing.worker.instance_type=m1.medium

this will enable 4.4.x instance types and disable the default Eucalyptus 5 instance types. The default instance type and the types used for services are updated accordingly.

Moving to Eucalyptus 5?

Upgrading from previous releases to Eucalyptus 5 is not supported. If moving to Eucalyptus 5 data such as S3 objects and EBS volumes can be copied from existing deployments before they are retired.

Thanks!

Thanks for giving Eucalyptus 5 a try and please use github issues to report any problems you encounter to help improve Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus 4.4.6 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 4.4.6 has been released, updating our OS support to allow use of CentOS and RHEL 7.9 in addition to the existing support for 7.x.

This release has some important compatibility and functionality fixes and is recommended for all 4.4.x deployments.

As with version 4.4.5, this release was tested using 2.9.0 qemu packages which should be installed when upgrading from earlier versions.

Some fixes of note in this release are:

  • EC2 instance metadata v2 support
  • EC2 node controller crash when running windows instance

You can find the full list of resolved issues in the release notes.

If upgrading from 4.4.2 or earlier, note that the RPM repository location has changed, updated Eucalyptus and Euca2ools release RPMs should be installed as detailed in the install guide so that the new downloads.eucalyptus.cloud location is used.

Eucalyptus 5 beta 1 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 5 beta 1 has been released, this release provides early access for trying out new functionality on non-production deployments.

We are exited to make 5.0 available as a preview to a wider audience to get feedback on new features in advance of the final release of Eucalyptus Cloud 5.

New in Eucalyptus 5

Some new features in Eucalyptus 5 are:

  • Auto Scaling instance protection
  • CloudFormation support for YAML templates
  • EC2 iam instance profile association
  • EC2 long resource identifiers
  • S3 bucket policy support
  • SQS service technical preview

Other notable changes in Eucalyptus 5 are:

  • Cluster controller now part of main cloud service
  • Java runtime updated to version 11
  • Reporting service removed

Full details of changes in Eucalyptus 5 are available in the Corymbia github project

Try Eucalyptus 5

You can try Eucalyptus 5 with a FastStart install by running:

> bash <(curl -Ls https://eucalyptus.cloud/install5ea)

as root, on a CentOS 7.6 minimal install with a few IP addresses to spare.

Miss Eucalyptus 4.4.x?

Eucalyptus 5 look a little different from 4.4.x due to changes with instance types and long identifiers. If you want to try Eucalyptus 5 but with a 4.4.x feel, you can make changes as follows.

To disable EC2 long identifiers, run the following as an administrator:

> euctl cloud.short_identifier_prefixes='*'

changing this setting will cause any new resources to be created with short identifiers (where supported). You can have a mix of short and long identifiers depending on settings when those resources were created.

To change instance types to be the same as 4.4.x, run the following as an administrator:

> euform-create-stack \
  --template-file /usr/share/eucalyptus/doc/ec2-instance-types-eucalyptus-4.yaml \
  eucalyptus-4-instance-types
> euctl cloud.vmtypes.default_type_name=m1.medium
> euctl services.imaging.worker.instance_type=m1.medium
> euctl services.loadbalancing.worker.instance_type=m1.medium

this will enable 4.4.x instance types and disable the default Eucalyptus 5 instance types. The default instance type and the types used for services are updated accordingly.

Thanks!

Thanks for giving Eucalyptus 5 a try and please use github issues to report any problems you encounter to help improve the final release of Eucalyptus 5.

Eucalyptus 4.4.5 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 4.4.5 has been released, updating our OS support to allow use of CentOS and RHEL 7.6 in addition to the existing support for 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5.

This release has some important compatibility and functionality fixes and is recommended for all 4.4.x deployments.

As with version 4.4.4, this release was tested using 2.9.0 qemu packages which should be installed when upgrading from earlier versions.

Some fixes of note in this release are:

  • The object storage gateway now supports version two object listing
  • EC2 instances for some images could hang when starting

You can find the full list of resolved issues in the release notes.

If upgrading from 4.4.2 or earlier, note that the RPM repository location has changed, updated Eucalyptus and Euca2ools release RPMs should be installed as detailed in the install guide so that the new downloads.eucalyptus.cloud location is used.

Eucalyptus 4.4.4 Released

Eucalyptus Cloud 4.4.4 has been released, updating our OS support to allow use of CentOS and RHEL 7.5 in addition to the existing support for 7.3 and 7.4.

This release was tested using updated qemu packages which should be installed when upgrading. This updates qemu to 2.9.0 from the 2.6.0 version previously distributed.

Some fixes of note in this release are:

  • The object storage gateway is updated to use less resources for background maintenance when there are buckets with many objects
  • The node controller would sometimes leave artifacts behind for terminated instances causing unnecessary disk use

You can find the full list of resolved issues in the release notes.

If upgrading from 4.4.2 or earlier, note that the RPM repository location has changed, updated Eucalyptus and Euca2ools release RPMs should be installed as detailed in the install guide so that the new downloads.eucalyptus.cloud location is used.

Eucalyptus 4.4.3 Released

We are excited to announce the Eucalyptus Cloud 4.4.3 release!

There are a couple of changes included that go beyond those in a typical maintenance release.

The release uses a 2-Clause/Simplified BSD license, which replaces the GPL license used by previous releases. Euca2ools and the management console were already BSD licensed, so with this release the licensing is consistent across the major components.

The RPM repository location has changed, updated Eucalyptus and Euca2ools release RPMs should be installed as detailed in the install guide so that the new downloads.eucalyptus.cloud location is used.

You can find the full list of resolved issues in the release notes.

Eucalyptus Previous Releases

We know how much you love Eucalyptus 4.4, but we also recognize that sometimes a cloud is working well on an older version and upgrading can wait.

In this post we take a look at how you can use the new downloads.eucalyptus.cloud RPM repositories with older releases, and where you can find the related documentation.

Documentation for previous releases

The current documentation has release notes that cover previous versions. Other documentation is available for previous releases as follows:

Eucalyptus 4.0Admin GuideConsole GuideImage GuideInstall GuideUser Guide
Eucalyptus 4.1Admin GuideConsole GuideImage GuideInstall GuideUser Guide
Eucalyptus 4.2Admin GuideConsole GuideImage GuideInstall GuideUser Guide
Eucalyptus 4.3Admin GuideConsole GuideImage GuideInstall GuideUser Guide

The above guides are available in PDF format only.

Repositories for previous releases

If using a release earlier than 4.4, please keep in mind that these previous releases are no longer supported or maintained. RPMs are available for previous releases at these locations:

Eucalyptus 4.0:

http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.0/rhel/6/x86_64/

Eucalyptus 4.1:

http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.1/rhel/6/x86_64/

Eucalyptus 4.2:

http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.2/rhel/6/x86_64/

Eucalyptus 4.3:

http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.3/rhel/6/x86_64/
http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.3/rhel/7/x86_64/

The 4.3 release can be installed on CentOS/RHEL 6 or 7, so pick the location appropriate for the distribution you are using.

Repository Configuration

You would configure YUM to use the above locations. Here’s an example of a 4.1 Eucalyptus YUM configuration, you’d put this in a /etc/yum.repos.d/eucalyptus.repo file:

[eucalyptus]
name=Eucalyptus 4.1
baseurl=http://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/eucalyptus/4.1/rhel/6/x86_64/
gpgkey=https://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/gpg/eucalyptus-release-key.pub
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

The baseurl would be one of the locations listed above.

On the first use after configuration, you may be prompted to confirm the GPG key, which would look something like this:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 RSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID c1240596: NOKEY
Retrieving key from https://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/gpg/eucalyptus-release-key.pub
Importing GPG key 0xC1240596:
 Userid: "Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. (release key) <security@eucalyptus.com>"
 From  : https://downloads.eucalyptus.cloud/software/gpg/eucalyptus-release-key.pub
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Accept the key and you’re good to go!

Conclusion

We hope this helps keep your Eucalyptus clouds running, but please consider using the latest software and documentation from https://eucalyptus.cloud/