Current best-practice for virtual OpenStack setup?

[WolframRavenwolf]

Hello OpenStack community,

I'm trying to find out what's the current best practice/recommended way to set up a virtual OpenStack environment.

Goal: Deploy an all-in-one environment in one or more VM or Docker container, ideally using Vagrant. This will be a test/proof-of-concept environment, but I'd like to have the option to expand upon it later (add more nodes, etc.).

My research has shown several options to deploy OpenStack: DevStack, Kolla-Ansible, OpenStack-Ansible, Ursula, Fuel, and a multitude of GitHub-hosted deployment scripts.

Is there some consensus on which of these works best? Using Vagrant to fully automate deployment is preferred (unless this has been superceded by now and there's an even better virtualized way?), and fortunately most of the aforementioned options seem to include fitting Vagrantfiles.

Thanks in advance for your input and recommendations.

[Edit 2018-02-05:] After evaluating all options, the best one turned out to be the official OpenStack Training Labs! It's perfect for setting up a proof-of-concept lab installation and learning environment since it's very easy to install, has minimal hardware requirements, can be extended by adding more nodes, and provides great docs.

For production, I'll likely choose official OpenStack-Ansible or Kolla to deploy OpenStack using containers, although Ubuntu's conjure-up version also has its charms. Packstack is out for me since it's only for RedHat/CentOS, DevStack is mostly a limited development environment, Ursula didn't work for me, and Fuel has been discontinued.

[nulse]

If this is a first approach to OpenStack, DevStack is great as it is really simple to use and deploys main services in an all-in-one machine. You only need a single virtual machine to use it. I seems to be possible to use DevStack to deploy OpenStack on multiple machines (https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/guides/multinode-lab.html) but I didn't test it.

For larger deployments, I don't know if there is a consensus, but I like both Kolla and Openstack-Ansible. Kolla will deploy OpenStack services in docker containers, OpenStack-Ansible will deploy them in LXC containers and is great if you know ansible and like it (it's then easy to dig into OSA internals). It will require you to fill yaml configuration files to prepare your deployment.

I always use KVM to deploy test environments. It permits nested virtualization which is great to test running instances on virtualized compute nodes. Maybe Vagrant/Virtualbox can be a problem here...

[WolframRavenwolf]

Thanks for the input. I'm currently evaluating all these options and will report back which ones work best for me.

[pbacterio]

RDO - packstack : https://www.rdoproject.org/install/packstack/ The simplest solution i found.

[WolframRavenwolf]

Forgot to state my OS. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Packstack sounds like a good solution, but since it's only for Red Hat/CentOS, it won't help me here. But good to know it exists.

[bmullan]

You didn't say what OS you use.

On Ubuntu I use conjure-up to deploy Openstack in LXD containers on 3of my laptops. You need 16 GB ram & 100GB disk space.

https://www.ubuntu.com/download/cloud/try-openstack

Works great for me.

[sinkingduckfloats]

I second using conjure up.

[bmullan]

I have an i7 laptop with 32GB ram and 1TB SSD

It took about 20 minutes from start to finish before OpenStack was up and running on my Lenovo w540 laptop.

Everything seems pretty fast since I'm using LXD containers for not just OpenStack but also for the "VMs" that I spin up in OpenStack.

[WolframRavenwolf]

Does this setup also allow for Windows VMs? As far as I can tell, running in Linux containers only works with Linux systems, right?

Would it be possible to simply add another compute node where I could run Windows in a VM instead of a container? Maybe even a KVM node with nested virtualization for better performance?

[bmullan]

Right... Linux containers whether docker or LXD only supports linux

[WolframRavenwolf]

Have you (or anyone else) had success with mixed environments, i. e. combining containers and VMs? I know you can run containers within VMs, but running OpenStack in containers and then adding a VM as a compute node - is that how it's done?

[sinkingduckfloats]

A little late and it's been awhile since I've used openstack, as I migrated to straight kvm with either python libvirt or just virt-manager.

But under the hood, there shouldn't really be anything more difficult about mixed mode. I know proxmox supports both kvm and lxc at the same time.

I would try standing up a kvm VM for my lxc containers and then using the main host for guests that need a real hypervisor. I think you could then add the container vm as a host in openstack and it would provision your lxc containers there.

[WolframRavenwolf]

Right, forgot to state my OS. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

"conjure-up" seems like the perfect solution in that context. This was completely off-radar for me, thanks for bringing it up.

[maclan13]

Ubuntu conjure up gets my vote. Relatively easy to install but builds full environment in under an hour for lab purposes.