Review the requirements below in their entirety before beginning installation.

Consistent with OpenStack’s reference architecture, we recommend a minimum of the following three nodes to operate an officially supported architecture. These are optimal for users seeking a private cloud offering on the SoftLayer platform.

• Cloud Controller Node
• Network Node
• Compute Node

Note: OpenStack can scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes. Running OpenStack on systems that do not meet the minimum requirements may negatively affect system or overall cluster performance.

    <th>Cloud Controller Node</th>

    <th>Network Node</th>

    <th>Compute Node</th>
  </tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>System</td>

    <td>Dual Processor</td>

    <td>Single Processor</td>

    <td>Dual Processor</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>RAM</td>

    <td>16 GB or greater</td>

    <td>8 GB or greater</td>

    <td>16 GB or greater</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Processor</td>

    <td>Quad-Core Xeon or greater</td>

    <td>Quad-Core Xeon or greater</td>

    <td>Quad-Core Xeon or greater</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Disk (OS Drive)</td>

    <td>Two physical disks in RAID1</td>

    <td>Two physical disks in RAID1</td>

    <td>Two physical disks in RAID1</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Disk (MySQL Database)</td>

    <td>Two physical disks in RAID0 or RAID1, or 4+ physical disks in RAID10</td>

    <td>N/A</td>

    <td>N/A</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Disk (Cinder Volumes)</td>

    <td>Two physical disks1 in RAID1, or 4+ physical disks1 in RAID10</td>

    <td>N/A</td>

    <td>N/A</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Disk (Instance Storage)</td>

    <td>N/A</td>

    <td>N/A</td>

    <td>Two physical disks in RAID1, or 4+ physical disks in RAID10</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Disk Space</td>

    <td>144 GB or greater</td>

    <td>144 GB or greater</td>

    <td>144 GB or greater</td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
    <td>Network</td>

    <td>1Gbps Private and Public</td>

    <td>1Gbps Private and Public</td>

    <td>1Gbps Private and Public</td>
  </tr>
</tbody>

(1) 10K SAS/SCSI RPM drives, or alternatively SSDs, may provide much better performance for Cinder when allocating and destroying volumes.

Check the requirements below to ensure your environment is compatible.

OpenStack supports Ubuntu Server Minimal 12.04 LTS.

The SoftLayer Chef recipes make use of the Ubuntu Cloud repository, which is where current OpenStack packages are maintained. The recipes automatically handle the configuration needed to use the Ubuntu Cloud repository.

Chef 11.4 or greater is required.

Have the following cookbooks handy before beginning the install process. You can download them at Opscode Cookbooks GitHub account.

• partial_search
• mysql
• ntp
• build_essential
• openssl

Within the SoftLayer environment and the Chef cookbooks provided, the reference architecture consists of three separate networks (two physical interfaces and one virtual interface). Refer to the following diagram to determine how various components and are connected, and the networks they’re connected to.

For OpenStack private cloud deployments, we recommend following best practices to secure your public network, exposing only the systems and services that you wish to make available over the Internet.

Included below is a table you can use to reference each description and some important notes.

    <th>Description</th>

    <th>Addressing</th>
  </tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>Private</td>

    <td>

  <tr>
    <td>Public</td>

    <td>

    <td>

  <tr>
    <td>Data</td>

    <td>

    <td>

A minimum, but not recommended, range of /30 (or four total IP addresses with one usable address) is required in order to use a SoftLayer Portable IP block within your OpenStack private cloud, whether on the public network or the private network. Whenever possible, we recommend using blocks larger than /30.

As with all networks, the first IP in a subnet is reserved for addressing the subnet, the second IP is already used by the upstream SoftLayer router (and in many networks this is the case), and the final address in the subnet is used for broadcast traffic.

With these constraints in mind, a /29 portable subnet would thusly provide six total with three usable IP addresses, a /28 subnet would provide 14 total with 11 usable IP addresses, a /27 subnet would provide 30 total with 27 usable addresses, and so forth.

Remember that the DHCP server used in Neutron will need an IP address on each subnet where DHCP is enabled. Keep this in mind when planning how large of a SoftLayer Portable IP block to order.

OpenStack utilizes NAT (Network Address Translation) across externally connected Neutron virtual routers. Any network that attaches to the router has external network access through NAT. The use of floating IP’s can reduce the size of the portable block you will have to purchase by allowing all compute instances to have outbound network access when not running inbound public services.

When creating new Data Networks to connect your instances, we recommend limiting Data Network subnets to the following IP ranges:

• 172.16.0.0/12 (or 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255)
• 192.168.0.0/16 (or 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)

Please note that any instance that is simultaneously connected to the SoftLayer Private Network and Data Network subnet within 10.0.0.0/8 is very likely to conflict and cause unforeseen problems, since the SoftLayer Private Network uses subnets within 10.0.0.0/8 as well.

If you absolutely need to create and use Data Network subnets within 10.0.0.0/8, ensure each instance assigned to them do not connect to the SoftLayer Private Network.