Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack was recently re-architected to be much more flexible and reliable in RPC v9 (Icehouse) and the soon to be released RPC v10 (Juno). It actually deploys OpenStack in LXC containers on your hosts. At first, you might think this adds a layer of complexity in an already complex process, but I’ve found it actually provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and an easier upgrade path for your OpenStack installation. Using this deployment method you should only have to edit two Ansible configuration files, so the process is not all that difficult and makes installing OpenStack simpler. ...

Quick guide on setting up the OpenStack Juno release in an all in one server with one NIC using RDO. This is configured for Neutron networking with floating IPs. My setup: CentOS 7 minimal, IP: 192.168.1.100 By default NetworkManager will be running and controlling our NICs. packstack will complain about this later so disable and stop the service. [root@juno-allinone ~]# systemctl disable NetworkManager [root@juno-allinone ~]# systemctl stop NetworkManager Next we’ll update some stuff, install the RDO Juno repo and install packstack. ...

Cloud Orchestration is an automated deployment service provided by Rackspace Cloud. The backend for this service is OpenStack Heat. The following is a simple template for deploying CoreOS Stable and runs a small bash script after the server is built to set it up for Cloud Monitoring. The script just performs the steps in my previous post on monitoring CoreOS with Cloud Monitoring. The template is pretty self explanatory so you can edit it to your liking. ...

Updated 8/5 to use systemd unit file. Recently decided to move my blog to containers and CoreOS for learning and fun. While setting up an HAProxy container on one of my CoreOS hosts I thought about how I would monitor the host. Luckily, smart people have already thought about this. :) I use Rackpace’s Cloud Monitoring and agent which can be setup on any server in any datacenter or cloud provider. Rackspace hosted servers get a nice GUI and awesome dashboard for the checks and monitoring data, but you could still set it all up on a non Rackspace hosted server using the Cloud Monitoring API and raxmon. ...

I upgraded my all in one OpenStack Havana box to the new Icehouse release. All the same steps apply as in my all in one OpenStack deployment post except use http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm which now redirects to the Icehouse RPM. I wanted to blow everything away and not perform an upgrade. The only issue I ran into was I boot my VMs with Cinder volumes for persistant storage (just use LVM to create a volume group named “cinder-volumes”) and I wanted to move those to Icehouse with the data untouched. ...

A couple days ago I moved my blog from Wordpress to Ghost. I found the the easiest way to get a full stack Ghost blog running is to use the Rackspace Ghost Deployment. The current version of the deployment comes with a full stack consisting of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS, Ghost 0.4, node.js 0.10.21, MySQL 5.5 and nginx 1.4.4 acting as the web server passing requests back to node.js. I run off of a 1GB Performance Cloud Server. I don’t use the included MySQL setup, instead I use a Cloud Database with 512MB RAM - 2GB storage as the backend database and Mailgun to send emails. To use an external database and your own SMTP settings just make the following changes to /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/ghost/config.js. ...