Smart Installer

StackOps sports a free, Web-based smart installer application which stores cloud configurations. For single-node configurations, it isn’t necessary to create an account on the service.

The Smart Installer Web app collects the configuration form responses to pass back to the relevant node when its time for deployment.

After firing up our first OpenStack instance, we could check on its status with the euca-describe-instances tool.

The StackOps Smart Installer also allows for deploying dual or multi-node OpenStack installations.

StackOps supports KVM and Qemu as hypervisor options. The slower qemu is required for compute nodes without hardware extensions for virtualization.

The fastest route to a test OpenStack instance is a single node deployment, but StackOps can work with dual and multinode configurations, as well.

Single node installations require very little configuration fiddling to get working—there’s little more to work out than which addresses on your test network to allocate for guest instances.

The OpenStack project includes a reference implementation of a Web-based admin console, which enabled us to perform some basic functions.