Building and inspecting KVM instances with OpenStack

In this recipe, we are going to build our first KVM instance using the OpenStack infrastructure we put in place in the previous recipes. Building a new KVM instance consists of the following steps:

1. We send an API call to the nova-api service.
2. The nova-api service requests a target compute host from the nova-scheduler service.
3. nova-scheduler picks an available compute host, based on the configured filters, such as available memory, disk, and CPU utilization.
4. Once the nova-scheduler selects an appropriate host, the nova-compute service on the selected host, requests the image from the Glance repository, if not already cached locally. Once the image is on the new server, nova-compute builds the new KVM instance.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we are going to need the following things:

• A database server, a message queue, and memcached installed and configured, as described in the Preparing the host for the OpenStack deployment recipe.
• The Glance...