What is OpenStack Nova?

Nova is a project in the OpenStack platform that was developed to provide quick access to compute resources and allow the provisioning and managing of instances, or virtual machines.

In This Article:

• Needed OpenStack Services To Use Nova
• Tools For Using Nova

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Needed OpenStack Services To Use Nova

The project supports creating virtual machines, bare metal servers, and has limited support for system containers. Through the support it provides, users can easily scale resources on-demand and as their needs increase or decrease. Working with other OpenStack services heavily, Nova is the most distributed project in OpenStack. To successfully run Nova, you’ll also need the following OpenStack services:

• Keystone: Provides identity and authentication for all OpenStack services.
• Placement: Responsible for tracking the inventory of resources available in a cloud and assisting in choosing which provider of those resources will be used when creating a virtual machine.
• Glance: Provides the compute image repository from which all compute instances launch.
• Neutron: Responsible for provisioning the virtual or physical networks that compute instances connect to on boot.

Tools For Using Nova

Users of Nova can create and manage their servers with tools or the API directly. The tools you can use to create and manage servers with Nova are:

• Horizon: The official web UI for OpenStack.
• OpenStack Client: The official CLI for OpenStack Projects. It includes commands for most of the OpenStack projects, not just Nova commands, and could be used as your CLI for most things.
• Nova Client: Used to access very advanced features or administrative commands of Nova. However, OpenStack CLI is recommended.