Eucalyptus: Euca2ools

In this series of posts on “Building an on-premise private cloud” we have so far:

• Installed Eucalyptus, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, and
• Configured Eucalyptus to start VMs with IP addresses from a private VLAN

Before we jump into bundling, uploading, and registering images, let’s first download and install Euca2ools.

Euca2ools

Euca2ools are command-line utilities to help:

• Manage Images (bundle, upload, register, delete, etc.)
• Manage Instances (start, reboot, terminate, list, etc.)
• Manage Volumes & Snapshots (attach, detach, list, create, delete, etc.)
• Manage IP addresses (associate, disassociate, list, etc.)
• Manage SSH key pairs (add, delete, list)
• Manage Security groups (add, delete, list, add rules)
• Query availability zones (clusters)

Euca2ools is compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3 web services. In fact, Euca2ools is modeled after Amazon EC2 API and EC2 AMI tools.

Download & Install

Since I have been using CentOS 5 32-bit, I’ll describe the tar ball install process for CentOS 5. Also, in my case I’ll install euca2ools on my front-end machine (192.168.0.114)

Note: You may choose to go the yum (you will need to add the http://www.eucalyptussoftware.com/downloads/repo/euca2ools/$VERSION/yum/centos/ repo first) route instead of the tar ball.

Note: If you are using a Debian-based distro, feel free to install using apt-get (apt-get install euca2ools)

First download the tar.gz package for CentOS 5 32-bit – in this case, euca2ools-1.2-centos-i386.tar.gz

Next un-tar the above package

tar zxvf euca2ools-1.2-centos-i386.tar.gz

Before you install the rpm packages in the euca2ools-1.2-centos-i386 directory, you need to install swig as follows:

yum update
yum install swig

Next, go into euca2ools-1.2-centos-i386 directory and install the rpm packages as follows:

cd euca2ools-1.2-centos-i386
rpm -Uvh python25-2.5.1-bashton1.i386.rpm python25-libs-2.5.1-bashton1.i386.rpm euca2ools-1.2-1.i386.rpm

Confirm that euca2ools is install as follows:

rpm -qa euca2ools

Testing Euca2ools

In the first post I used Amazon EC2 API tools to test the Eucalyptus install. To be precise I had used the ec2-describe-availability-zones command.

Now that we have Euca2ools installed we can use the euca-describe-availability-zones command instead. Remember to source in the eucarc file first.

cd .euca
source eucarc
euca-describe-availability-zones verbose

Nice!

Feel free to play around with some of the other commands. You can get a list of commands by typing “euca” and pressing the TAB button twice. You could also run the command ls /usr/bin | grep euca

To get more information on a particular command, type in the command name following by the argument –help. For instance:

euca-describe-availability-zones --help

As we continue these series, we will see more and more of the Euca2ools commands.