OpenStack installation
The list of components that have been covered is not the full list. This is just a small subset to get you started with using and understanding OpenStack. Further components that are defaults in an OpenStack installation provide many advanced capabilities that we will not be able to cover. Now that we have introduced the OpenStack components, we will illustrate how they work together as a running OpenStack installation. To illustrate an OpenStack installation, we first need to install one. Let's use the RDO Project's OpenStack distribution to do that. RDO has two installation methods; we will discuss both of them and focus on one of them throughout this book.
Manual installation and configuration of OpenStack involves installing, configuring, and registering each of the components we covered in the previous chapter, and also multiple databases and a messaging system. It's a very involved, repetitive, error-prone, and sometimes confusing process. Fortunately, there are a few distributions that include tools to automate this installation and configuration process.
One such distribution is the RDO Project distribution. RDO, as a name, doesn't officially mean anything. It is just the name of a community-supported distribution of OpenStack. The RDO Project takes the upstream OpenStack code, packages it in RPMs and provides documentation, forums, IRC channels, and other resources for the RDO community to use and support each other in running OpenStack on RPM-based systems. There are no modifications to the upstream OpenStack code in the RDO distribution. The RDO project packages the code that is in each of the upstream releases of OpenStack. This means that we'll use an open source, community-supported distribution of vanilla OpenStack for our example installation. RDO should be able to be run on any RPM-based system. We will now look at the two installation tools that are part of the RDO Project, Packstack and RDO Triple-O. We will focus on using RDO Triple-O in this book. The RDO Project recommends RDO Triple-O for installations that intend to deploy a more feature-rich environment. One example is High Availability. RDO Triple-O is able to do HA deployments and Packstack is not. There is still great value in doing an installation with Packstack. Packstack is intended to give you a very lightweight, quick way to stand up a basic OpenStack installation. Let's start by taking a quick look at Packstack so you are familiar with how quick and lightweight is it.
