Writing the initial deployment plan

Taking the time to document the very first deployment might seem a bit obsessive, but it provides us with the opportunity to begin iterating on the documentation that is the key to successful OpenStack deployments. We'll start with the following template.

Hardware

The initial deployment of OpenStack will leverage a single commodity server, a HP DL380.  Its details are listed in the following table:

Hostname	Model	CPU cores	Memory	Disk	Network
openstack	DL380	16	256 GB	500 GB	2 x 10 GB

 

This deployment provides a compute capacity for 60 m1.medium instances or 30 m1.large instances.

Change the specifications in the table to meet your deployment. It's important to specify the expected capacity in the deployment document. For a basic rule of thumb, just divide the amount of available system memory by the instance memory. We'll talk more about accurately forecasting capacity in a later chapter.

Network addressing

There is one physical provider network in this deployment. SDN is provided in the tenant space by Neutron with the OVS ML2 plugin. Its details are listed in the following table:

Hostname	MAC	IP
openstack	3C:97:0E:BF:6C:78	192.168.0.10

 

Change the network addresses in this section to meet your deployment. We'll only use a single network interface for the all-in-one installation.

Configuration notes

This deployment will use the RDO all-in-one reference architecture. This reference architecture uses a minimum amount of hardware as the basis for a monolithic installation of OpenStack, typically only used for testing or experimentation. For more information on the all-in-one deployment, refer to: https://www.rdoproject.org/.

For the first deployment, we'll just use the RDO distribution of the box. In later chapters, we'll begin to customize our deployment and add notes to this section to describe where we've diverged from the reference architecture.

Requirements

The host system will need to meet the following requirements prior to deployment:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (or CentOS 7)
• Network Manager must be disabled
• Network interfaces must be configured as per the Network Addressing section in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
• The RDO OpenStack repository must be enabled (from: https://rdoproject.org/)

To enable the RDO repository, run the following command as the root user on your system:

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