Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat OpenStack Platform

1.2. Installation Prerequisites Checklists

The following tables describe prerequisites for successfully installing a Red Hat OpenStack Platform environment. Checklist items are the minimum that should be known or verified before the installation is started.
The Value/Verified column can be used to provide the appropriate value or a 'check' that the item has been verified.

Note

If you are installing single components after the initial Red Hat OpenStack Platform installation, ensure that you have the following permissions:
  • root access to the host machine (to install components and perform other administrative tasks such as updating the firewall).
  • Administrative access to the Identity service.
  • Administrative access to the database (ability to add both databases and users).

Table 1.1. OpenStack Installation: General

Item Description Value/Verified
Hardware requirements
Hardware requirements must be verified.
Yes | No
Operating system
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Server
Yes | No
Red Hat subscription
You must have a subscription that entitles your systems to receive the following updates:
  • Package updates from the Content Delivery Network or an equivalent source such as a Red Hat Satellite server
  • Software updates for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Server and Red Hat OpenStack Platform
Yes | No
Administrative access on all installation machines Almost all procedures in this guide must be performed as the root user, so you must have root access. Yes | No
Red Hat subscription user name and password
You must know the Red Hat subscription user name and password.
  • Name:
  • Password:
Machine addresses
You must know the IP address or host name of the server or servers on which any OpenStack components and supporting software will be installed.
Provide host addresses for the following services:
  • Identity service
  • OpenStack Networking
  • Block Storage service
  • Compute service
  • Image service
  • Object Storage service
  • Dashboard service
  • Database server or servers

Table 1.2. OpenStack Identity Service

Item Description Value
Host access
The system hosting the Identity service must have access to the following components:
  • Content Delivery Network or equivalent service
  • Network interface addressable by all OpenStack hosts
  • Network access to the database server or servers
  • If using LDAP, network access to the directory server
Verify whether the system has access to the following components:
  • Yes | No
  • Yes | No
  • Yes | No
  • Yes | No
SSL certificates
If you are using external SSL certificates, you must know where the database and certificates are located, and have access to them.
Yes | No
LDAP information If you are using LDAP, you must have administrative access to configure a new directory server schema. Yes | No
Connections The system hosting the Identity service must have a connection to all other OpenStack services. Yes | No

Table 1.3. OpenStack Object Storage Service

Item Description Value
File system
Red Hat currently supports the XFS and ext4 file systems for object storage; one of these must be available.
  • XFS
  • ext4
Mount point
The /srv/node mount point must be available.
Yes | No
Connections The system hosting the Object Storage service requires a connection to the Identity service. Yes | No

Table 1.4. OpenStack Image Service

Item Description Value
Back-end storage
The Image service supports a number of storage back ends. You must decide on one of the following:
  • File (local directory)
  • Object Storage service
Storage type:
Connections The server hosting the Image service must have a connection to the Identity service, the dashboard service, and the Compute services. The server must also have access to the Object Storage service if it is using Object Storage as its back end. Yes | No

Table 1.5. OpenStack Block Storage Service

Item Description Value
Back-end storage
The Block Storage service supports a number of storage back ends. You must decide on one of the following:
  • Red Hat Ceph
  • LVM/iSCSI
  • ThinLVM
  • NFS
  • NetApp
  • Dell EqualLogic
  • Dell Storage Center
Storage type:
Connections The server hosting the Block Storage service must have a connection to the Identity service, the dashboard service, and the Compute services. Yes | No

Table 1.6. OpenStack Networking

Item Description Value
Plug-in agents
In addition to the standard OpenStack Networking components, a number of plug-in agents are also available that implement various networking mechanisms.
You must decide which of these apply to your network and install them.
Circle the appropriate plug-in:
  • Open vSwitch
  • Cisco UCS/Nexus
  • Linux Bridge
  • VMware NSX virtualized network platform
  • Ryu OpenFlow Controller
  • NEC OpenFlow
  • Big Switch Controller Plugin
  • Cloudbase Hyper-V
  • MidoNet
  • Brocade Neutron Plugin
  • PLUMgrid
Connections The server hosting OpenStack Networking must have a connection to the Identity service, the dashboard service, and the Compute services. Yes | No

Table 1.7. OpenStack Compute Service

Item Description Value
Hardware virtualization support
The Compute service requires hardware virtualization support.
Yes | No
VNC client
The Compute service supports Virtual Network Computing (VNC) console access to instances through a web browser. You must decide whether this will be provided to your users.
Yes | No
Resources: CPU and memory
OpenStack supports overcommitting of CPU and memory resources on Compute nodes:
  • The default CPU overcommit ratio of 16 means that up to 16 virtual cores can be assigned to a node for each physical core.
  • The default memory overcommit ratio of 1.5 means that instances can be assigned to a physical node if the total instance memory usage is less than 1.5 times the amount of physical memory available.
Decide:
  • CPU setting:
  • Memory setting:
Resources: host
You can reserve resources for the host, to prevent a given amount of memory and disk resources from being automatically assigned to other resources on the host.
Decide:
  • Host Disk (default 0MB):
  • Host Memory (default 512MB):
libvirt version You must know the version of libvirt that you are using in order to configure Virtual Interface Plugging. Version:
Connections The server or servers hosting the Compute service must have a connection to all other OpenStack services. Yes | No

Table 1.8. OpenStack Dashboard Service

Item Description Value
Host software
The system hosting the dashboard service must have the following packages already installed:
  • httpd
  • mod_wsgi
  • mod_ssl
Yes | No
Connections
The system hosting the dashboard service must have a connection to all other OpenStack services.
Yes | No