OpenStack workshop, part 2: OpenStack cloud installation

A Step-by-Step Cloud Setup Guide

Article from ADMIN 13/2013

By Martin Loschwitz

The first article in this workshop looked at the theory behind OpenStack; the second part takes a more hands-on approach: How can you set up an OpenStack cloud on a greenfield site?

Because of the diversity of cloud systems on the markets right now, choosing the right system for your needs can be rather difficult. Often, however, the suffering only really starts once you've left this step behind and chosen OpenStack. After all, OpenStack does not exactly enjoy the reputation of being the best-documented project on the open source scene. The documentation has become a whole lot better recently, not least because of the tenacity of Anne Gentle, the head of the documentation team; however, it still is lacking in some places. For example, it is still missing a document that explains the installation of an OpenStack cloud from installing the packages through setting up the first VM. In this article, I'll take a step-by-step look at setting up an OpenStack cloud.

Don't Panic!

OpenStack might look frightening, but you can use most of its components in the factory default configuration. In this article, I deal with the question of which OpenStack components are necessary for a basic OpenStack installation and how their configuration works. The goal is an OpenStack reference implementation consisting of three nodes: One node is used as the cloud controller, another acts as a node for the OpenStack network service, Quantum, and the third node is a classic hypervisor that houses the virtual machines in the environment.

Required Packages

Also in this article I assume you are using Ubuntu 12.04. But, if you are looking to deploy OpenStack Folsom, the default package source in Ubuntu 12.04 is not very useful because it only gives you packages for the previous version, Essex. Fortunately, the Ubuntu Cloud Team for Precise Pangolin has its own repository with packages for Folsom, which you can install in the usual way. For the installation to work, you need the ubuntu-cloud-keyring package, which contains the

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