{"id":82,"date":"2014-08-04T08:11:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T08:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tuxlabs.com\/?p=82"},"modified":"2016-03-01T23:02:47","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T23:02:47","slug":"how-to-install-openstack-icehouse-on-centos-6-5-using-packstack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuxlabs.com\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"How To: Install Openstack Icehouse on CentOS 6.5 Using Packstack"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"openstack-software-diagram\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

A brief introduction of Openstack + My thoughts<\/h3>\n

Openstack is open-source software for building clouds. It was created in 2010 by people from Rackspace & NASA, but is currently managed by the non-profit Openstack Foundation, which includes members from the who’s who of the technology sector that have joined forces to continue to invest & develop Openstack (written in Python) for fun and profit( well not so much ). It is definitely fun though :-). In fact I have been having nothing, but a blast since the moment I meant Openstack in 2012. However, admittedly the first time I worked on Openstack it was on the Essex release and I felt it had a ways to go before it was ready for prime time. At that time it was not only hard to install, but most of the people around it were hard core Pythonista’s (Python developers), that were rapidly trying to a mature Openstack & it’s ecosystem that just wasn’t production ready yet. And while the latest release of Openstack ‘Icehouse<\/strong>‘ (which I am covering in this blog) is leaps and bounds better, it can still be quite a PITA(Pain In The Ass) for first timers. In fact I still struggle with the idea of running Openstack in production because it requires an incredible amount of resources, engineering skill & organizational persistence to do so. Companies willing to embark on this journey thus far have included Mercado Libre, Dell, HP, Redhat, Canonical (the Ubunut guys), eBay, PayPal and Symantec among many others. These companies were required to beef up their engineering staff & allocate large amounts of resources just to take on this challenge. In addition their commitments were probably tested over and over again and their leadership had to respond with tremendous faith when timelines began to slip. However, organizations that complete this journey recognize that the return at the end of the tunnel is a compounding return. For starters you aren’t locked into to a vendor like VmWare or AWS (Amazon Web Services) who are both incredibly expensive, but the compounding return comes from skills it will build internally and the culture that will be a bi-product.<\/p>\n

Coming here to Tuxlabs means you have personally accepted this mission to learn Openstack and you are in need of some guidance don’t worry you are in good hands. I will show you the light, which can be hard to see through the darkness if you try to take on the documentation all by yourself : http:\/\/docs.openstack.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

So sit back, relax, read, and type exactly as I do. In the end you will have a perfectly functioning Openstack Icehouse cloud and if you decide to bring this into your organization remember with great power comes great responsibility…<\/p>\n

You will change everyone in your organization from a POSA (Plain Old Sys Admin’s) to Cloud Engineers and Architects jumping into the Openstack Python code base at the sniff of an issue.<\/p>\n

Devstack<\/h3>\n

Devstack is a shell script used to quickly and easily deploy an all-in-one install of Openstack on any machine or VM for the purposes of trying, testing, and developing on Openstack. It is extremely easy to install, use and get going, if you have not used Devstack already I recommend trying it first because it is a quick and easy way to get a learning win + it will help you decide what you want to learn more about and whether or not Openstack is what you are looking for. However, you do not want to run Devstack in production for starters because production deployments should be multi-node setup’s not all Cloud services deployed on one machine like Devstack does.<\/p>\n

The Book<\/h3>\n

My favorite Openstack book to date is by far is the Openstack Cloud Computing Cookbook<\/a> written by Kevin Jackson. <\/a>This book is so great because gets straight to business giving you the commands & understanding needing to get Openstack up and running quickly unlike most other book that bore you with unnecessary details. The first time I installed Openstack Essex I used this book and it worked like a charm, however, that was on Ubuntu, which this book was written for. If you want to install Openstack on Redhat you can do so from scratch or you can use RDO.<\/p>\n

RDO<\/h3>\n

RDO technically doesn’t stand for anything !\u00a0http:\/\/openstack.redhat.com\/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_does_RDO_stand_for.3F<\/a>, but I don’t really buy that and have found some people expanding the acronym to the\u00a0R<\/strong>edhat D<\/strong>istribution of O<\/strong>penstack which I think sounds incredibly fitting. RDO has a website<\/a> dedicated to a community of people running Openstack on Redhat, CentOS and Fedora. Because Redhat is still the leader in production Linux deployments in the enterprises of the world, I chose to use it in my own lab environment & for the purposes of this tutorial. However, because I cannot afford the license cost of Redhat Enterprise Linux I am using the free community release of RHEL known as CentOS or the Community Enterprise Operating System. For the purposes of this tutorial we will be installing CentOS 6.5 with a minimal install on a bare metal system and then installing Packstack according to the instructions on the RDO website. Then we will go a step further.<\/p>\n

Getting Started<\/h3>\n

A production Openstack deployment has a minimum of 3 nodes one for the Controller, Network, and Compute nodes and that would not cover a Highly Available deployment where you would need the capability to failover functions to standby nodes when there was an outage or maintenance needed. However, for the purposes of this article I will be showing you what is called an all-in-one install where the Controller, Network, and Compute functions all live on the same node and in future articles we will expand on this knowledge to build a production capable multi-node deployment of Openstack.<\/p>\n

Before We Begin<\/h4>\n

You will need…<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A system that you have root access to, to install Openstack on. I am using an SGI Rackable with 16GB of RAM and 4.5TB of usable disk ( in a hardware RAID 10). Openstack does not require a lot of resources, but if you’re going to spawn a lot VM’s you need a lot of Cores (vCPU’s), Memory and Storage. See this link for more info:\u00a0 http:\/\/docs.openstack.org\/grizzly\/openstack-compute\/install\/yum\/content\/compute-system-requirements.html<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. That system should have dual NIC’s, although I think it is possible to use virtual interfaces for a lab environment if you have to.<\/li>\n
  3. To configure the hostname of your controller in DNS mine is diamond.tuxlabs.com, but most people go with controller.yourdomain.com (if you don’t have or use DNS, just make sure you configure your hosts file \/etc\/hosts with the information)<\/li>\n
  4. The system you use should have CentOS 6.5 installed with a Minimal Install using the defaults no extra’s.<\/li>\n
  5. Your brain, keyboard, fingers and a fresh beer and possibly an ice chest with more beer depending on how far the fridge is.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Assumptions<\/h3>\n