[OpenStack Beginner’s Guide for Ubuntu 11.04] – Instance Management

Instance management

An instance is a virtual machine provisioned by OpenStack on one of the nova-compute servers. When you launch an instance, a series of steps are triggered on various components of the OpenStack. During the life cycles of an instance, it moves through various stages as shown in the diagram below:

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[OpenStack Beginner’s Guide for Ubuntu 11.04] – Image Management

Image management

There are several pre-built images for OpenStack available from  various sources. You can download such images and use them to get familiar with OpenStack. You can refer to  http://docs.openstack.org/cactus/openstack-compute/admin/content/starting-images.html for details on using such images.

For any production deployment,  you may like to have the ability to bundle custom images, with a custom set of applications or configuration. This chapter will guide you through the process of creating Linux images of Debian and Redhat based distributions from scratch. We have also covered an approach to bundling Windows images.