Using the Grid Appliance to Run FutureGrid Cloud Clients

Summary:

This tutorial provides instructions for you to perform a quick install of clients that give you access Eucalyptus and Nimbus clouds on FutureGrid using a virtual machine (Grid appliance) on your desktop.

Introduction

This tutorial will guide you through the steps needed to install Nimbus and Eucalyptus clients on the Grid appliance. It is intended for those who do not have cloud client tools installed on their own desktop, would like to test these client-side tools within a "sandbox", and/or are having difficulties installing and configuring the client tools.

Prerequisites

1) Have VMware, VirtualBox or KVM virtualization software on your desktop to run the Grid appliance.
2) Follow the quick start guide from the Grid appliance portal for instructions on how to run a Grid appliance.
3) Follow the Using Nimbus of FutureGrid tutorial to learn how to install nimbus-client.

Boot up your Grid Appliance

Download and unzip the Grid appliance image. Double-click on Grid appliance.vmx to instantiate it. Once you are in the interactive shell that opens automatically in the Grid appliance, type:

passwd (create a new password for you; the default password is "password" without quotes)
sudo bash (enter the password you just created above)
apt-get update

Install Nimbus client

  1. Install Java:

    apt-get install openjdk-6-jre (answer "Y" to the prompt)
     
  2. Install Nimbus client tools: Follow the instructions here to download and install the current version of the Nimbus client tools (version 0.19 as of June 3, 2011). Also follow the instructions on that Web site to download your Nimbus credentials (nimbus_creds.tar.gz) from Hotel.

Install Eucalyptus client
  1.  Install Boto:

    apt-get install python-boto
     
  2. Install MCrypto:

    apt-get install m2crypto
     
  3. Install Make:

    apt-get install make
     
  4. Install euca2ools: Follow this link to the Eucalyptus downloads page; download the "source" package for euca2ools, located in the lower right corner of the page. Copy it into your Grid appliance (e.g. using "sftp").

    Follow the directions in the Euca2ools install page     to complete the installation (note: skip the installation of Boto and Mcrypto, these are already installed from the previous steps).