In this post, we want to look at the Openstack platform and its role in the world of virtualization.

Understand the workings of the Openstack platform

Openstack platform is software developed to build and manage cloud computing platforms for private and public cloud systems. The Openstack platform has one of the largest communities of professionals.

The platform is managed by the Openstack Foundation, a non-profit organization tasked with organizing the development and coordination of the software community. The official website of this software is available at https://www.openstack.org/ .

The Openstack platform is used to install virtual machines and other instances that are tasked with performing a variety of tasks to manage a cloud environment.

The Openstack platform is known as an IaaS service infrastructure. Based on the information provided by the Openstack Foundation, the following schematic is provided in which you can see how to manage this software.

Source: https://www.openstack.org/

The Openstack platform is managed by a user dashboard on the web. This dashboard contains nine main components.

The main components are described in detail below:

• Nova : is a computing engine. The Nova engine is used to set up and manage a large number of virtual machines.
• Swift: A storage system for objects and files.
• Cinder : A component for block storage. It can access specific locations on the hard drive.
• Neutron : allows us to network.
• Horizon: A dashboard for the Openstack platform. It is just a graphical web interface (WEB UI9).
• Keystone : Provides an authentication service. It is required to create a central list of all users.
• Glance: Provides an image service on the Openstack platform. By “image” we mean the same images or (virtual copies) of the hard disk.
• Ceilometer: Provides a telemetry service that allows the cloud to issue service bills for people who use the cloud.
• Heat: Allows programmers and developers to store the requirements and requirements of a software in a file that determines what resources are needed to run the software.

Published versions of the Openstack platform are described in the image below.

Install Openstack platform

Because the Openstack platform is an open source platform, there are many ways to install and develop a variety of distributed versions. Each of them adds its own value to your cloud operating system.

To create a new management system that wants to run on the Openstack platform, you must have a pre-installed ISO image of the Openstack platform. You can download this image from https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/obtain-images.html .

The following versions are available for manual installation.

• Ubuntu Linux operating system: https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/openstack
• Red Hat Linux operating system: https://www.rdoproject.org /
• Suse Linux operating system: https://www.suse.com/products/suse-openstack-cloud /

One thing to know is that the Openstack platform is for enterprise environments, and to install it we must have the following hardware requirements.

Installation requirements

The installation requirements for the Openstack platform are as follows:

• At least 5 cars that have the following specifications:
  • 1 machine for MAAS server;
  • 1 car for Autopilot;
  • 3 more cars for cloud space;
    • At least 2 physical network cards;
    • At least 2 to 3 hard drives;
• A dedicated switch to create a LAN, for private cloud space
• Internet access through a router on the LAN

For the lab environment, we need to have a virtual machine and install Devstack on it. It is designed to be installed on a single laptop, PC or virtual machine. It contains raw upstream codes for development evaluation. And It is supported on the following operating system versions:

• Ubuntu Linux versions 14.04 and 16.04
• Fedora Linux operating system versions 23 and 24
• CentOS Linux OS RHEL 7
• Debian Linux operating system
• OpenSUSE Linux operating system

The link for this version is at https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/#install-linux .

Install and run the Openstack platform on the Ubuntu Linux operating system version 14.04

To install Openstack platform on Ubuntu Linux version 14.04, we need to do the following steps:

Step 1 : Download the script from the Git site at h ttps: //git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-dev/devstack .

You can use the git clone command https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack to do this.

Step 2 : Go to the Devstack folder using the $ cd devstack command.

Step 3 : Run the stack.sh file using the ./stack.sh command and continue the installation process to show you what is shown in the image below.

Step 4 : Enter your password.

Step 5 : Now, depending on the strength of your system, it will take between 15 to 20 minutes to complete the installation process, during which time the program will download and install the necessary libraries.

Step 6 : At the end of our installation process you can see the IPs and URLs for management, as well as the username and password for management.

Step 7 : To log in to the site, we must enter the following information in our browser: IP‌ host, username and password that was provided to us during the installation process.

Step 8 : In the main dashboard, you can see an overview of the Instances.

Step 9 : Click Instances to build Instances, or more simply, virtual machines.

Step 10: Click on Launch instances.

Step 11 : Fill in the fields similar to what you are shown.

Step 12 : You can now see the Instances or virtual machines similar to the ones shown in the screenshot below.

If you have a question or suggestion about this post, you can comment it for us at the bottom of this post, we will answer all of them as soon as possible.