Gather parameters to launch an instance

List the available flavors and note the ID of the flavor that you want to use for your instance.

$ nova flavor-list

+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+
| ID | Name      | Memory_MB | Disk | Ephemeral | Swap | VCPUs | RXTX_Factor | Is_Public |
+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+
| 1  | m1.tiny   | 512       | 0    | 0         |      | 1     | 1.0         | True      |
| 2  | m1.small  | 2048      | 20   | 0         |      | 1     | 1.0         | True      |
| 3  | m1.medium | 4096      | 40   | 0         |      | 2     | 1.0         | True      |
| 4  | m1.large  | 8192      | 80   | 0         |      | 4     | 1.0         | True      |
| 5  | m1.xlarge | 16384     | 160  | 0         |      | 8     | 1.0         | True      |
+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+

List the available images and note the ID of the image from which you want to boot your instance.

$ nova image-list

+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+--------+--------+
| ID                                   | Name                            | Status | Server |
+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+--------+--------+
| 397e713c-b95b-4186-ad46-6126863ea0a9 | cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec         | ACTIVE |        |
| df430cc2-3406-4061-b635-a51c16e488ac | cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec-kernel  | ACTIVE |        |
| 3cf852bd-2332-48f4-9ae4-7d926d50945e | cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec-ramdisk | ACTIVE |        |
+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+--------+--------+

You can also filter the image list by using grep to find a specific image, as follows:

$ nova image-list | grep 'kernel'

| df430cc2-3406-4061-b635-a51c16e488ac | cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec-kernel  | ACTIVE |        |

List the available security groups and note the ID of the security group that you want to use for your instance.

	Note
	If you are an admin user, specify the --all-tenants parameter to list groups for all tenants.

$ nova secgroup-list --all-tenants

+----+---------+-------------+----------------------------------+
| Id | Name    | Description | Tenant_ID                        |
+----+---------+-------------+----------------------------------+
| 2  | default | default     | 66265572db174a7aa66eba661f58eb9e |
| 1  | default | default     | b70d90d65e464582b6b2161cf3603ced |
+----+---------+-------------+----------------------------------+

If you have not created any security groups, you can assign the instance to only the default security group.

You can view rules for a specified security group:

$ nova secgroup-list-rules default           

List the available key pairs and note the name of the key pair that you use for SSH access.

$ nova keypair-list