After getting a grasp on all of the concepts that I have discussed regarding OpenStack, I have decided to give my dev server a re-deploy, namely to set up LVM for proper use with Cinder.

I noticed a few things that should probably be noted when using packstack to configure an OpenStack host.

First off, packstack is not necessarily just for setting up lab environments. By running packstack –help, the program will output a plethora of options that can be used for controlling how packstack runs. This can be used to limit deployment to just a few options, so that, for example, it only deploys a compute node, or a storage node, etc. It also allows for answer file use. With fine-tuning of the options, packstack can be used to configure entire clouds, or at the very least more sophisticated multi-server labs.

Another thing to note is that there are several options that are set by default that may not be desired. For example, ultimately my second run at at an OpenStack all-in-one is looking like this:

packstack --allinone --provision-all-in-one-ovs-bridge=n --cinder-volumes-create=n --nagios-install=n

This excludes the following:

• The Open vSwitch bridge setup. This is because I want to re-configure the Open vSwitch bridges again as per this article.
• Creation of the test Cinder volume group – I already have one created this time around that I want to use with Cinder. This is named cinder-volumes as per the default volume group that Cinder looks for, and is also the volume group that packstack will create with raw file on the file system, which is not suitable for production use. If you have this volume group set up already and do not select this flag, packstack will ultimately fail.
• Disabling the installation of a full Nagios monitoring suite on the host, as I plan to set up monitoring later – and not with Nagios, mind you!

Remember that you can check out a brief rundown on how to install and use packstack at the quickstart page on RDO.