An account is needed in order to use the OpenNebula cloud. The cloud administrator will be responsible for assigning these accounts, which have a one to one correspondence with OpenNebula accounts, so all the cloud administrator has to do is check the configuration guide to setup accounts, and automatically the OpenNebula cloud account will be created.

In order to use such an account, the end user can make use of clients programmed to access the services described in the previous section. For this, she has to set up his environment, particularly the following aspects:

• Authentication: This can be achieved in three different ways, here listed in order of priority (i.e. values specified in the argument line supersede environmental variables)
  • Using the commands arguments. All the commands accept an Access Key (as the OpenNebula username) and a Secret Key (as the OpenNebula hashed password)
  • Using EC2_ACCESS_KEY and EC2_SECRET_KEY environment variables the same way as the arguments
  • If none of the above is available, the ONE_AUTH variable will be checked for authentication (with the same used for OpenNebula CLI).

• Server location: The command need to know where the OpenNebula cloud service is running. That information needs to be stored within the EC2_URL environment variable (in the form of a http URL, including the port if it is not the standard 80).

The EC2_URL has to use the FQDN of the EC2-Query Server

Lets take a walk through a typical usage scenario. In this brief scenario it will be shown how to upload an image to the OpenNebula image repository, how to register it in the OpenNebula cloud and perform operations upon it.

• upload_image

Assuming we have a working Gentoo installation residing in an .img file, we can upload it into the OpenNebula cloud using the econe-upload command:

<xterm> $ econe-upload /images/gentoo.img Success: ImageId ami-00000001 </xterm>

The user should take note of this ImageId, as it will be needed to register the image.

• register_image

The next step should be registering the image to enable its instantiation. We can do this with the econe-register command:

<xterm> $ econe-register ami-00000001 Success: ImageId ami-00000001 </xterm>

• describe_images

We will need the ImageId to launch the image, so in case we forgotten we can list registered images using the econe-describe-images command:

<xterm> $ econe-describe-images -H Owner ImageId Status Visibility Location

helen ami-00000001 available private 19ead5de585f43282acab4060bfb7a07 </xterm>

• run_instance

Once we recall the ImageId, we will need to use the econe-run-instances command to launch an Virtual Machine instance of our image:

<xterm> $ econe-run-instances -H ami-00000001 Owner ImageId InstanceId InstanceType

helen ami-00000001 i-15 m1.small </xterm>

We will need the InstanceId to monitor and shutdown our instance, so we better write down that i-15.

• describe_instances

If we have too many instances launched and we don't remember everyone of them, we can ask econe-describe-instances to show us which instances we have submitted.

<xterm> $ econe-describe-instances -H Owner Id ImageId State IP Type

helen i-15 ami-00000001 pending 147.96.80.33 m1.small </xterm>

We can see that the instances with Id i-15 has been launched, but it is still pending, i.e., it still needs to be deployed into a physical host. If we try the same command again after a short while, we should be seeing it running as in the following excerpt:

<xterm> $ econe-describe-instances -H Owner Id ImageId State IP Type

helen i-15 ami-00000001 running 147.96.80.33 m1.small </xterm>

• terminate_instances

After we put the Virtual Machine to a good use, it is time to shut it down to make space for other Virtual Machines (and, presumably, to stop being billed for it). For that we can use the econe-terminate-instances passing to it as an argument the InstanceId that identifies our Virtual Machine:

<xterm> $ econe-terminate-instances i-15 Success: Terminating i-15 in running state </xterm>

You can obtain more information on how to use the above commands accessing their Usage help passing them the -h flag