I have been experimenting with OpenStack in a personal lab at home. My motivation has been to get some hands on exposure with Quantum. OpenStack is definitely not a trivial task to set up. I have built it with DevStack, a script that builds complete OpenStack development environments, and have encountered a few bumps along the road. The first one was of package dependencies. I have learned that unlike on our personal laptops running MacOS or Windows, when running a Linux server, such as Ubuntu, patching the kernel to the latest release is not always a good idea. In the case of DevStack, I ran into package dependency errors, which are a nightmare to resolve. There is no general consensus on forums for how to mitigate them.

The only way I was able to get around this was to run the DevStack script with an unaltered kernel from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. That means no running of ‘apt-get update’ followed by ‘apt-get upgrade’. I was able to get OpenStack successfully running with Kernel 3.2.0-29, which is what Ubuntu 12.04 LTS comes with natively. I’ve attended a few OpenStack meetups and my experience is consistent with those of other attendees who I have interacted with. In hindsight, it is not surprising that DevStack broke because OpenStack has so many constant code changes and moving parts. DevStack, which pulls the latest release from Git Hub, is likely to break if a major variable change, such as kernel upgrade, is introduced.

I got some help from the inimitable Brent Salisbury, whose blog posts have come in handy on several occasions. Next I plan to add customizations to my OpenStack installation, such as adding Quantum plug-ins rather than using nova-network.