What you need for this book
To use this book, you will need access to computers or servers that have hardware virtualization capabilities. In a typical small starter installation of OpenStack, you will need a Controller host, Network host, and Compute host. To run Swift, we provide the steps to create a multi-node environment consisting of a proxy server and five storage nodes.
To set up the lab environment, you will install and use Oracle's VirtualBox and Vagrant. You can access details of how to set up your computer using VirtualBox and Vagrant by visiting http://bit.ly/OpenStackCoobookSandbox.
There are additional recipes to get you started with the lab environment, and these are available at http://www.openstackcookbook.com. Refer to this website for information on the installation of supporting software such as MariaDB/MySQL. More information can be found at http://bit.ly/OpenStackCookbookPreReqs.
To fully utilize the automated Ansible scripts in Chapter 11, Production OpenStack, it is assumed that the reader has access to six physical servers.