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OpenStack installation with the Packstack installer

Living in the Clouds

Article from ADMIN 46/2018

By Grzegorz Juszczak

At first sight, an OpenStack installation might seem like rocket science, but you can launch a fully functional cloud environment with minimal effort in a relatively short time with the Packstack automation tool.

For several years, cloud computing in the global IT market has become common, both in corporate infrastructure and among private users. In medium and large companies, it replaces a not very flexible, poorly scalable, and often expensive computer infrastructure, whereas it allows small businesses, startups, and private users to transfer the entire burden of providing IT services to an external supplier.

In addition to the division into private and public clouds, you can divide cloud computing according to the types of services offered. In this category, two types of clouds lead: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS; e.g., OpenStack and Amazon Web Services), which provides the entire virtual infrastructure, including servers, mass storage, and virtual networks, and Storage as a Service (SaaS; e.g., Dropbox, Hightail), which delivers storage space to clients.

The ways to install an OpenStack cloud range from a tedious step-by-step installation of individual OpenStack services to the use of automated installation scripts, such as Packstack or TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack), which significantly accelerates cloud installations. Whereas TripleO is used mainly in installations for production environments, Packstack [1] is used for quickly setting up development or demonstration cloud environments.

In this article, I present an example of an IaaS-type RDO [2] OpenStack Pike [3] installation using the Packstack installer.

OpenStack

A typical OpenStack environment comprises a cloud controller (Controller node) that runs most of the cloud services, including network services (Neutron), and at least one Compute node (hypervisor) controlling the operation of virtual machines, called instances. The most common reason for integrating

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