Setting it all up was surprisingly easy and much less of a headache than I thought, in many ways thanks to the fantastic OpenStack Ubuntu manual (the hardware currently runs 12.04 LTS).

This is the first virtual server that’s actually doing something a “medium” instance, running a wordpress site powered by a MariaDB backend. The performance isn’t great, but then again it’s old hardware and there are probably some knobs waiting to be twisted and turned in their appropriate directions.

I had previously played around with “devstack.sh” which is basically one huge bash script that pulls the latest and greatest from git and works all kinds of magic, but there are two major downsides to this approach:

• not really intended for production sites
• It’s basically a black box that mostly works but leaves you baffled as to what it actually did to your system.

So after a couple of vain attempts I decided to take the no-shortcut route and install everything manually, hopefully leaving me with a stable system that can be updated as new releases openstack releases appear.

Next on the list: Cinder for block storage fun, then maybe giving glusterfs on some hapless CentOS VMs a try  😉