At this point, there has been what may seem like an excessive amount of groundwork laid to get to launching an instance. We now have a project for the instance to live in, an image using which it can boot off, a network for it to live in, and a key pair to authenticate with. These are all the necessary resources to create in order to launch an instance, and now that these resources have been created, they can be reused for future instances that will be launched. Without further delay, let's launch the first instance in this OpenStack environment as follows:

undercloud# openstack server create --flavor 2 --image Fedora --key-name openstack --nic net-id={internal net-id} "My First Instance"

This launches an instance using the small flavor, the key pair we just imported, the Fedora image from Chapter 3, Image Management, and the project network from Chapter 4, Network Management. This instance will go through a few different states before it is ready to use. You can see the current state of your instances by listing them as follows:

undercloud# openstack server list

This command will list the instances in your project. This list will include the ID of the instance, its name, its status and the networks that it is assigned to. Once the instance boot process completes, the instance will settle in an active state. The first time an instance boots, it will take an extra minute or two because the image file has to be copied from Glance to the hypervisor. Successive instance launches should happen in less than a minute.

Initially, the only communication you have with the instance is getting console logs or connecting to the console via Nova, as follows:

undercloud# openstack console log show "My First Instance"
undercloud# openstack console url show "My First Instance"

The first command will print the console log of the instance if it's available. This is useful to help debug why an instance won't start or to find out if it got an IP address from DHCP. The second command will give you a URL that can be loaded into your browser to give you a VNC console to the running instance.