Cloud Networks is a really cool up and coming feature in the Rackspace Cloud. It enables you to create private networks only accessible by your Cloud infrastructure. When first released, you could only attach a Cloud Server to Cloud Networks when creating a new Cloud Server or by taking an image and then creating a new Cloud Server based off of that image and attaching Cloud Networks at that time. Not the best situation if you already have a stable Cloud infrastructure. Luckily we can now attach Cloud Networks to an already running Cloud Server. Make sure the server is a NextGen Cloud Server based on OpenStack. This tutorial was run on Debian 6 Squeeze, but should be pretty much the same on other Linux distros. If you have any issues with a particular distro please let me know.

First we need to install a few packages. The easiest way is to use pip.

Now we will create a file for our Rackspace credentials and enter your information in the < > parts of the file.

We should be able to run some nova commands and receive the information we need to attach Cloud Networks.

Now we use nova to attach the Cloud Network to your existing Cloud Server.

You should receive a response with the IP etc information for the new virtual interface.

When you run virtual-interface-command with your instance ID you should see the new interface. You should also see it in the control panel and with a command such as ip a on the actual server.

You should now have your Cloud Network attached to your already running Cloud Server. There are a number of ways to do this, but I ran this on the actual Cloud Server. You could really run this wherever you can run rackspace-novaclient and install the Cloud Network plugin, os__virtual_interfacesv2_python_novaclient_ext. If you have any questions or need any help with this, please leave a comment or shoot me an email and I will get back to you.

Here are some links that might further help with this task.

http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cn-devguide/content/api_virt_interfaces.html

http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cs-gettingstarted/content/section_gs_install_nova.html