Customizing an OpenStack instance

When an image is deployed, you might have to customize the resulting instance on startup to apply network configurations, login information, application settings, and so on, before the instance is ready for use.

About this task

IBM® Cloud Manager with OpenStack provides a deployment property to enable OpenStack config drive support when deploying an image. This support is used to pass customizations (for example: server metadata, user data, personality files, and SSH keys) to an instance. The config drive can be accessed by any guest operating system capable of mounting an ISO9960 file system. Images that are built with a recent version of the cloud-init software package, or similar software package such as IBM SmartCloud® init, can automatically access and apply the supported customizations that are passed to the instance by the config drive.
Note: For more information about the cloud-init software package and the customizations that it supports, see CloudInit.
IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack also supports the Pluggable Configuration Strategy feature added by IBM to OpenStack. This feature is similar to the config drive support in that it provides an instance with the necessary customizations. Like config drive, the image must be built with the correct software package for the configuration strategy to automatically access and apply the customizations. In particular, this feature provides support for Open Virtualization Format (OVF) or Microsoft Windows System Preparation (Sysprep) configuration. For more information, see the following resources: