How to setup the infrastructure with blade servers for OpenStack

Question

We have 24 Huawei CH242 V3 blade servers and want to setup a private cloud with OpenStack, but we're very new to OpenStack and very lack of experiences about infrastructures. Could somebody kindly give us some useful information about the following question:

• What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?
• Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?
• What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?

Maybe some questions are very silly but we're really stuck on the first step, thanks in advance for any information.

Answer 1

Below is my suggestions and there can be more good answers too

1. What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?

   You can try any Linux flavours (OpenSUSE/CentOS/Ubuntu) mentioned in the openstack official site. I personally used Ubuntu for installing openstack.

   There are openly available JuJu charms that works on Ubuntu for installing Openstack services. So it will be easy for you to edit the charms and deploy.

2. Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?

   I will prefer VM based installation from your list of choices. I personally suggest you to use containers to deploy your openstack services for better performance.

   For compute service, you can go for bare metal installation, but it is upto you.

3. What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?

   a. Try installing the same topology/setup as mentioned in the openstack documentation
   b. Use recommended databases and AMQP brokers

Answer 2

What kind of OS is more suitable for those blade servers? Is Linux like CentOS a good choice?

I use CentOS7.2, its very stable for openstack. and Ubuntu is also stable which is tried.

Is it OK(or encouraged) to directly use blade servers as OpenStack controller/compute/storage nodes? Or do we need to use one hypervisor to create many VMs and install OpenStack services on top of VMs?

Yes, I do like this, use bare machine as controller/compute/storage, performance good for me, I did not use container like docker.

What're the best practices or suggestions will you want to give beginners?

Because you are new to openstack, I recommend you begin with install openstack, see more logs when you install it. read official website docs is necessary. but you need to notice there are also some errors in the docs, and the configuration also is not optimized, that is just for experiment of private cloud.

If you are skilled at install openstack, then you can read the source code on github, try to contribute the code for it, from fix docs typo.