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Prerequisites

Whether you are just getting started with OpenStack or you are a seasoned veteran, there are a few things you will need to get started. This guide will walk you through the steps to get your environment ready for OpenStack.

What Kind of Hardware Do I Need?​

If you are just getting started, you may not have data centers full of HPE or Dell servers to run OpenStack on. That's OK! With Kolla-Ansible, you can get started by running OpenStack on a single node. Then as you get more comfortable, you can start to add more nodes to your environment and expand out your environment.

The great thing about using Kolla-Ansible to deploy OpenStack is that you can start small and then add capacity as needed to add redundancy or add more services to your environment.

You can set up an initial VM on a Rocky Linux Server with KVM, Proxmox VM, VMware VM, or just a spare machine you might have laying around.

Typically to get started, you will need:

  • A decent internet connection
  • A bare metal or virtual machine with at least 4 cores
  • Rocky Linux 9.x installed
  • At least 16GB of RAM
  • At least 100GB of disk space
  • At least 1GB of network bandwidth
  • Two network interfaces (one for management, one for OpenStack)

Types of Deployments​

All in One (AIO)​

An All in One (AIO) deployment puts all services on one node. This is useful for testing and development, but not recommended for production. It is a great way to get started as you can rapidly make changes and iterate on your environment. It gives you a quick way to determine if a new feature will work before rolling it out to your main clusters.

All operations will happen on this node, so it is important to have enough resources to run all of the services you want to run. If you want to run VMs in the AIO stack, you will need to ensure you can operate nested KVM on if you are running in a Virtual Machine.

If you have the resources available, you can generally just start with a Mutli-Node deployment.

Multi Node​

Once you are comfortable with an AIO deployment, you can start to expand your environment to multiple nodes. This is where OpenStack really shines. You can start to add more nodes to your environment and add redundancy and scale out your environment. Typically you will want to scale out the control plane so that it is highly available and then focus on scaling out the compute nodes to add more capacity to your environment. This is all managed by Ansible inventory and adding those resources to the various groups in the Ansible inventory file.

Consistency is Key​

While setting up your environment, always remember that consistency is key. In a production environment, you will want to ensure that all of your nodes are configured in a uniform fashion. This will make it easier to troubleshoot issues and ensure that you can easily add new nodes to your environment. Having variations in the environment can make it much more difficult to troubleshoot issues and can lead to a lot of headaches down the road. As you build out your environment, try and lock things into code as much as possible. This includes things like:

  • Firmware Versions and BIOS Settings of your servers
  • Operating System Installations and Configurations
  • Kolla-Ansible Deployment
  • Kolla-Ansible Configuration
  • OpenStack Configurations