In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to run Windows Server 2016 on OpenStack.
Download the Fedora VirtIO drivers. You can find more options here.
In this example we will use VirtalBox, although you can also use KVM on Linux for this.
Choose a name, as a type, choose Microsoft Windows, and as a version choose Other Windows (64 bit).
Assign the VM a minimum of 2GB memory.
Create a virtual disc with a minimum disc-space of 15GB, the standard 20GB is fine, as a type, choose QCOW.
Now you have a VM you can boot.
The two ISOs now have the correct start-up sequence, after booting, your VM will start to install from the ISO.
After booting the VM, the installation of Windows will start automatically.
Windows wants to be aware of some regional settings, after which it will ask which version of Windows to install.
Now you have the option to install the viostor SCSI drivers, these are necessary, even though we use the IDE controller of VirtualBox at this moment.
To see the drivers, navigate to e:\viostor\2k16\amd64\, and remove the checkbox so you can see everything.
Choose the disc and let the installer do its job.
Finally, Windows will ask for a passphrase, after that the installation will be finished. Because you want to create an image, you now have to edit your own settings. There are many manuals available on rules about what you can and cannot edit, and why. We will limit ourselves to the necessary settings.
What stands out is that the network isn’t working, this is because the drivers have not been installed.
After this, the NIC will work, we will need this in a while but now we know for sure that the necessary IO drivers are installed.
Click on Start > Settings, and search for remote desktop, now choose allow remote desktop access to your computer.
In the popup choose for Allow remote connections to this computer, Click OK to close the popup.
If you are using an unofficial- or older RDP client, remove the checkbox below.
You can now test the RDP connection, which should work by now.
When the installation is finished, select both run Sysprep and Shutdown when Sysprep terminates.
If you click Finish the Windows installation will be prepared for use as an image and the VM will be closed.
Now you have a Windows image that is switched off, based upon a qcow file which we can upload to OpenStack.
When the upload speed of your internet connection isn’t that high (because Windows images are mostly around 10GB) I suggest you use the OpenStack CLI tools for this (see below).
Image Source > Image File en select the qcow image you have created. The location can be found in VirtualBox. In my case it’s a qcow of nearly 13GB.
Now, the web-interface will upload the entire image, after which it will be processed and put inside the list of available images.
Make sure that the OpenStack CLI tools are installed on your system. If not, you can follow our CLI tutorials.
If you don’t see the new image in the list, try to create it once more.
On the left, choose Access & Security. Click on Security Groups and add a security group with RDP access for the IP you’re connecting from (Go to this website to retrieve your IP). If you do not have this yet, you can also add this, and connect the Security Group to your instance later.
Create a new instance in the Instances panel. To be able to login Windows later, you need a passphrase. The passphrase we had set earlier does not work anymore. Click on the Metadata tab to add a new custom key admin_pass, after which you can assign a value which is shown in plain text. This is a bit annoying, but you have to change the passphrase again after the initial login anyway.
This post, written by Yuri Sijtema, was first published on Fuga Academy, the learning branch of Fuga Cloud, a self-service, on-demand, cloud service based in the Netherlands.
Ben Armstrong, principal program manager on the core virtualization team at Microsoft, gets you up and running in about an hour — coffee break included.