Setting up an Openstack cloud environment in less than 30 minutes

I have been working with Openstack on & off from past 1 year mainly for the purpose of learning and understanding the various use cases of Openstack Cloud. In this blog post I will be writing about one of the most simplest installation methods for beginners, which allows users to run Openstack in a box in less than 30 minutes.

For this blog post I will be using Redhat’s RDO distribution of Openstack and will be showing you the installation for Liberty, the latest version of Openstack. You can check all the releases of Openstack here.

One very kool fact about Openstack releases are that they follow a naming scheme in Alphabetical order A=Austin, B=Bexar, C=Cactus ……….. J=Juno, K=Kilo, L=Liberty, M=Mitaka and so on. The current security supported releases are Juno, Kilo and Liberty.

Prerequisites:

– Download and install the latest version of Redhat EL with minimum packages , if you are a big fan of GUI then go ahead and use the Server with GUI option in the Software Selection section.
– You can also install the Virtualization packages if you intend to run VMs or Instances on the same node.
– Make sure that you have a working network with internet for updates and package installations.
– Have a Static IP and a NTP server handy for the setup.
– Use FQDN for the server to avoid issues with Packstack.
– Make sure that you are registered with the RHN (Red Hat Network) using your official/work email id if you are using it for trial or have a valid RHN subscription.

Now lets have a look at the setup process.

Step 1: Register your Redhat installation with RHN. Login to the Openstack VM using ssh and run the below command.

$ sudo subscription-manager register --username <username> --password <password> --auto-attach

Provide your RHN Username and Password , once successful you should see a message like below.
You can also verify the status on the Redhat Portal.
Step 2: Update the Software repository in the system. Since we are using RHEL we need to add some extra and optional repositories. Type the below commands on the SSH console

 $ subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
 $ subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpms

Below is the output of the commands executed.

Now it’s time to update the system packages to latest, update your current packages

$ sudo yum update -y

Setup the RDO repositories, this will point to the Liberty release of Openstack packages.

$ sudo yum install -y https://rdoproject.org/repos/rdo-release.rpm

Step 3: Install Packstack which is a utility that uses Puppet modules to deploy various parts of OpenStack on multiple pre-installed servers over SSH automatically. Currently only Fedora , Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and compatible derivatives of both are supported.

$ sudo yum install -y openstack-packstack

Step 4: Now we have all the packages and dependencies installed. It’s time now to run Packstack. Packstack takes the work out of manually setting up OpenStack. For a single node OpenStack deployment, run the following command.

$ sudo packstack --allinone

Once the process is complete, you can log in to the OpenStack web interface “Horizon” by going to http://$YOURIP/dashboard. The username is “admin”. The password can be found in the file /root/keystonerc_admin of the control node.

Now open a browser and point to the Openstack Dashboard.
Provide the username as asmin and password noted from the /root/keystonerc_admin file, you can change the password later through the dashboard or the keystone command line.

After login you will be presented with the Openstack Dashboard, it’s time to start your Openstack journey. 
I hope that you like this article, there is lot of exciting stuff coming up from Nutanix and it’s integration with Openstack. I will be writing about that in coming days so stay tuned.