OpenStack Installation on a Single Node

OpenStack is a free and open software that allows different people and organizations to build it how they like and in the best way that is comfortable for them.

This will be a straight-to-the-point article. Since big companies and cooperatives are deploying OpenStack, they always require a lot of high-end machines (servers and nodes) and more technical skills to deploy it. But here we will talk about ways of deploying OpenStack (its components) on a single machine (node), an example would be on an old laptop/desktop, a Raspberry Pi(8 GB RAM), a headless computer or a virtual machine.

The minimum requirements for the single machine(system) should be a processor(at least two cores), memory(at least 8GB) and storage(at least 60GB).

There are three major ways of deploying OpenStack on a single node.

Wow, that’s a lot of stacks right there 😂.

Devstack

DevStack is nothing but a series of scripts used to install a complete OpenStack development environment. It is mainly for people contributing to OpenStack, where they can make changes and test their local environment to make sure things are working fine. DevStack can also serve as a starting point for OpenStack enthusiasts who are willing to have a local environment to play around with and make as many experiments and mistakes as possible.

It is easy to set up and can be reinstalled as many times as possible to try out things.

Note: DevStack should not be used in production as it wasn’t created for that purpose.

Supported platforms:

Ubuntu
Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL)
CentOS

Resources for installing OpenStack with DevStack

PackStack

PackStack is a single-node installation of OpenStack on RHEL and other RHEL-compatible distros. Packstack is a deployment tool intended to serve as a proof-of-concept for the installation of OpenStack in a small environment.

Supported platform(s):

Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL)
CentOS
Other compatible derivatives of RHEL

Resources for installing OpenStack with PackStack:

MicroStack

MicroStack is an Ubuntu solution for the installation of OpenStack on a single machine. MicroStack was designed for small-scale cloud environments, edge deployments, testing, and development. Cloud computing systems like OpenStack, can be complex due to their need to manage many interconnected resources and require certain technical skills to deploy in production. Microstack can be a good stepping stone and starting point. MicroStack is opinionated and not as configurable to help reduce some of the complexity.

Supported platform(s):