Introduction

Those who have tried to deploy OpenStack by following Installation guide you figured that’s a bit complex and probably spent quite some time to make it work. After went through manual deployment first few times, I started to look into tern-key solution for evaluation. (In my opinion, doing manual deployment is still good thing to do to understand how each OpenStack component works, understand dependencies etc..). RDO is good to look into for RHEL based distribution. Mirantis has simple OpenStack deployment tool called Fuel to build OpenStack cloud from bare metal with user’s choice from following deployment options:

OpenStack Release – Icehouse on CentOS 6.5 or Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS
Compute – KVM, QEMU or vCenter
Network – Nova-network, Neutron with GRE or VLAN
Cinder – LVM or Ceph
Glance – Local storage (or Swift in HA environment) or Ceph
Optional
- Sahara (previously known as Savanna project)
- Murano
- Ceilometer

Mirantis provides VirtualBox automated script to build VMs to configure for starters. In this blog post, I will walk through how to deploy OpenStack cloud using Fuel on VirtualBox.

Requirement & Preparation

VirtualBox 4.2.16 (or later) along with the extension pack. (With Windows machine, you will need to use Cygwin to run installation script and manually build VM’s. See detail on complete doc from Mirantis.)
8GB+ RAM (16GB is better)
Download Mirantis OpenStack iso and VirtualBox script from Mirantis download site

I used following in this environment

MacBook Air 13-inch, 8GB RAM, Mid-2012 model
Mirantis OpenStack 5.0
VirtualBox 4.3.14 r95030 with the extension pack

Installing Fuel using VirtualBox automated script

When you unzipped the VirtualBox script zip file, you can find following files and directory.
You will need to place the Mirantis OpenStack iso file into the iso directory.
Make “launch.sh” executable and run it.
Now it’s time to have a cup of coffee 🙂

$ ls
README.md actions  config.sh functions iso  launch.sh
$ ls iso
MirantisOpenStack-5.0.img MirantisOpenStack-5.0.iso README.md

$ ./launch.sh

The automated script will configure VirtualBox networking and build a VM and automatically install a Fuel Master node from the iso.

Once the Fuel Master node installation is completed the script will configure three more VM’s for slave nodes. The Slave nodes will PXE boot from the Master node (same to bare metal installation). After installation is done the VirtualBox looks like below.

At the end of the script, you will see below message and now It’s ready to build your OpenStack environment.

<..>
Slave nodes have been created. They will boot over PXE and get discovered by the master node. 
To access master node, please point your browser to:
http://10.20.0.2:8000/

Building OpenStack Environment using Fuel

Log into Fuel Master node. On top right corner, there are three slave nodes discovered.
Click New OpenStack Environment.

Follow Manu to specify your deployment options. I used below on my environment.
Make sure to use QEMU since this is a virtual host

Once you created the OpenStack environment, you will need to add nodes into your environment
> Add Nodes

Assign Role(s) to each node you add
> Apply Changes

Configure 3 Slave nodes as Controller, Compute and Cinder
You can find how the Fuel configures Networking (Public, Management, Storage, Nova-network (Fixed, Floating)). Leave it default.
> Deploy Changes
You will see progress of installing CentOS and OpenStack
Now it’s time to have another cup of coffee 🙂